Laughter is certainly a better offensive weapon than violence, right?
If only your minority group laughs while the huge majority around just looks at you confused wondering what you're talking about, I'd say it's at best ineffective.
OK, I "searchedaround." The evidence I've found suggests that the influence of religion on secular education is not a concern limited to either the USA or Christianity.
Those things fit within what I pointed: US cultural influence abroad. Creationism vs. Evolutionism is pretty much like Hollywood movies, spreading from the same cultural powerhouse with the same intensity.
Did you have a point you'd like to make with respect to these findings? Do you believe that it's healthy for civilization to see these beliefs growing in influence over the course of the 21st century, rather than diminishing as any sane person would have expected?
Oh, I'd say I'm indifferent. As a non-US person observing from far away, I find it all fascinating, but it really doesn't bothers me either way. It doesn't matter what you teach in school, most people will glance over biology teaching, memory whatever is required of them to pass exams, promptly forget it all the next day, and move on. As for the very few remaining ones that happen to develop an interest in the subject up to the point of entering college, they learn better anyway, be it better evolutionism, as no matter what you do it'll be badly taught in schools, or simply evolutionism at all. So, what's really the problem? Be this or be that, the end result is the same.
The sane approach then, for me, is quite simple: whoever is paying decides what their money will be used for. If in a region the paying people want teachers teaching a subject, so be it.
God only enters the picture as the bullshit reason these control freaks give for their actions, but we have long ago realized that it's the reason for the dumb. The reason for the smart has always been power.
The do the smart thing: attack the actual problem, those guy thirst for power, not the literary devices they use for rhetorical purposes while trying to get there.
The problem with atheists in general and new atheists in particular is that they don't study war doctrine, otherwise they'd know that winning is most of times a matter of a) not causing otherwise neutral parties to ally with your enemy because you made yourself seem more dangerous than them; or, better yet, b) causing those neutral parties to ally with you.
Making religion a subject of widespread mockery will be part of the solution, whether you like it or not.
Nope, because that alienates non-crazy religious individuals, who end up despising both the crazy ones as well as rationalists. Americans have this bad habit of thinking the world is like their country, when in fact if you search around the globe you'll find USA is, nowadays at least, the place from where the craziest religions and religion-branches come from. Mormonism, channeling, UFO cults, Scientology, Creationism, New Age fluff -- all of them genuine made-in-USA.
Do this: search around. You won't find a single country other than the USA where creationists have either the political power or the infiltration within Christian branches as they do over there. And there where these idiotic things seem to be gaining a foothold, such as that case with the South Korean textbooks, you'll find behind their proponents the backing of some US-based fringe group, never a native development.
This, incidentally, is why the also US-born form of aggressive atheistic rhetorics I read falls flat anywhere else where it attempts to establish itself. The effect doesn't resonate because the attack target simply isn't there.
Thus, the more you generalize, the less effective you become. Remember the adage: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Either you apply it, or they will. Go around punching who has nothing to do with the issue and, instead of hurting your real target, you'll end up hurting yourself and your own cause.
Absolutely! I'm going to go download the Linux kernel, make my own changes to it and distribute it without providing the source code! Screw Linus and his stupid copyright!
Sure, provided I can also use your binary any way I want, including decompiling your changes and reusing them in whatever project of mine.
GPL is a clever workaround to the lack of the above right. Given that without copyright there's no advantage for a company to keep things binary-blobbed, no one would feel something missing due to lack of something like the GPL.
Obviously it's a hypothetical argument, but I can say that as an aspiring novelist, my motivation to finish my book would be lessened if I knew that even if my work went viral, I would have nothing to show for it except for a few book readings at coffee shops.
I have free, easy, unDRMed access to every single book, music, movie and TV show made in the last few years via torrent, Usenet and other means. Ask me how many of those I've read, listened or watched have been not-paid for. Answer: only those I couldn't purchase because they were locked behind idiotic geographical and similar restrictions, luckily fewer and fewer as time passes.
Your argument is simply false. In regards to a piece of content there are always three types of people: a) those who will always purchase it, b) those who will only purchase it if they don't find a way to get it for free and c) those who will never purchase it even if it's free (and who doesn't matter for this discussion). Catastrophists like you think 'a' is almost 0% while 'b' is almost 100%, and that's simply absurd. Sure, if you lose 'b' your revenue will lessen, but if anything, the last years have shown that 'a' is way, way bigger than your nightmares would like you to believe. Want a suggestion? Ignore 'b'. They aren't worth your time. Concentrate on 'a' and you'll have plenty of enjoyment in your work.
"Leave them alone, Lieutenant. We don't have the copyright license to copy them, because the owners are long dead."
You made me remember the plot of a short story I read, I think, in an old Asimov SF magazine. Aliens come here in the stone age, become quite amazed at cave painting, a completely novel art form for them, but cannot make copies and must delete the recordings because their ethical system requires them to pay for cultural goods with some other cultural good of theirs at the same technological level, but all they have is more advanced than stone age tech, so no exchange, and no cave paintings for them. One of them however has a nice idea: giving humanity bows and arrows. The other aliens are doubtful, arguing that's quite a technological leap for humanity, which might not be ready to deal with such weapons. The other guy prevails though, with an argument akin to: "Hey, they're almost there anyway, and those paintings are soooo nice. After all, it's just bow and arrows. What could possibly go wrong?" And so they depart, with their properly purchased photos and a new art form, and in exchange we get a new, efficient and very lethal new means of war.
and you wish people would just leave those poor peaceful islamic peoples alone ?
Yes, because their peacefulness, or lack thereof, is theirs and their actual friends and enemies' problem, not the USA's. Let them alone and they'll have plenty of fighting among themselves to even start bothering about whatever is going on half a planet away. Keep stomping around there and you'll only give them the single, foreign, "not-like-us" enemy their worse element's rhetoric crave as a reason for uniting them.
But such a common-sensical foreign policy won't happen because the USA both need cheap oil (paying whatever their owners actually want for it, in a purely demand/offer, free market dynamics, is evidently a no-no, hence the imposing of lower prices by force) and a captive international demand for the US dollar (1 - print paper with no counterpart in goods and service; 2 - force "friendly" international oil producers to only accept said paper, causing every industrial country in the world to have a demand for it; 3 - provide said paper in exchange for actual goods and services, thus lowering and hiding the real costs of your standard of living by artificially transferring them to those countries in "need" of your printed paper; 4 - do not bother providing anything useful in return, there's no need; 5 - profit!). Hence, war, war, war, war, war...
Oh, so your inability to understand the laws is then an excuse to simply ignore them?
Actually, here in Brazil people ignoring a law is usually reason enough for it to start being ignored by law agents too. This is so common we've even developed a language expression for these cases: "The law on 'x' hasn't caught." In fact, in cases were the government is really adamant about getting people to start following a certain rule, they go about approving a similar law a few more times over a wide time span, so that one can say something to the effect of "the law on 'x' finally caught on the fourth attempt, 6 years after the previous one and 43 years after the first". And then it sometimes also happens that a law goes out of fashion for a few decades, then "caughts" again, etc.
So, anyone, business owner or not, has a fair chance of having his ignoring of a law he thinks dumb validated if enough other people follow suit. Sure, he might be unlucky enough to be chosen as an example by the government when it's trying to make the law to catch. But most often than not it won't.
There's one exception to this though: tax law. When it comes to getting money, almost nothing, not even street riots, will cause the government step back. Those are almost the only laws that "catch" no matter what.
Also, in regards to the OP's mention of Brazilian laws clusterfuckery nature, I'll give you one example. There are two main taxes on manufactured goods here, a Federal and a State ones. The mix and match of laws has made it so that you must pay the State one over the sum of the good's price plus the Federal one, *and* you must pay the Federal one over the sum of the good's price plus the State one. Yes, they iterate recursively, so that to find what you actually owe in Federal and State taxes for the good you're selling you have to apply a "lim 0->inf" over the thing. Try to explain *that* to an illiterate baker...
A better one, although still not quite fit, might be this: "...I still need to be able to regularly go into theaters and scream 'Fire', as well as publicly accuse random strangers of being pedophiles without the risk of being sued. However, this isn't allowed..."
The problem with long term data archival isn't just the storage medium -- it's being able to recreate the reader mechanism from scratch.
These are two different problems. One is how to archive things assuming the future will be technologically proficient, another is how to archive things assuming it won't. This technology is clearly geared towards the former. In a technologically proficient future, historians will certainly love having full access to the tons of small details and day-to-day stuff that can be made available for them with this, things we wouldn't dream even trying to archive in something geared towards a technologically backwards future.
The nice thing is that it isn't an either/or proposition. We can easily target both goals with different methods. Done right, the small but important stuff archived for a technological deficient future can include instructions on how to unlock the other, larger archive, even if it takes centuries for them to achieve the level of proficiency required. And then you get the best of both worlds: a retechnified future plus very happy historians.
Interestingly enough, Baha'i don't consider their prophet to be the final one - their doctrine is that God periodically sends prophets to reveal further parts of his plan, and theirs is merely the most recent in line.
Interesting indeed. It's similar to Buddhism, which believes a new Buddha arises whenever the last one's been forgotten. Or to Hinduism, with its sequence of avatars of this or that major god.
Since Baha'i claim to have a propher (Baha'u'llah) who came after Muhammad, they are blasphemers to Islam. Ditto for Ahmadis, and many others.
Well, they all operate within the framework of "the one who is going to come back". For Christians Christ is the omega, there's no one coming afterwards, only he himself coming back. But then we get Islamic scholars identify Muhammad with the Christian Paraclete. So, not much surprise in seeing others afterwards taking the role of the Mahdi, reinterpreted as *the* New Ultimate Final One(TM) -- until the next.
If I'm at my wife's funeral (stoned to death for showing her legs in public), rubbing the stump where my hand used to be (for any one of a number of "offenses"), I'm not going to quibble about the difference between violence to spread Islam, and violence to spread Sharia law.
Except that's not quite how the thing works. I don't know about the wife stoning, although I do remember the requirement is for women to use veils over their hair, and that's that (burqas are a cultural thing from some places, not others). As for the hand cutting, from what I studied of the Islamic schools of jurisprudence the rule is that it's only a valid punishment if the government provides for the the needs of the poor, thus there's absolutely no need for one to steal to stay alive, and hence that the thief's impulse to steal was 100% the result of an evil intent of his. Weren't it like this and we'd be seeing a huge amount of amputees in the news, clearly not the case.
Cyrus the Great let everybody of any religion live in peace in his kingdom. He even paid respect to the minority religions, including ordering the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple. Islam had nothing on Cyrus when it came to religious tolerance.
Well, except his policies faded, things got worse, then a LONG time afterwards the Islamic solution came around, and in a form that managed to last a fair bit more. But, yeah, I myself prefer polytheistic approaches to these issues. They have a tendency of producing less aggressive outcomes, what with the whole "you have gods? we also have gods! let's join them!" mindset. Although that's not always the case, evidently.
Yep. I didn't mean that Iran wasn't persecuting, only that I didn't know anything specific about the Baha'i persecution, which is only one among many persecutions that go on over there. If that makes any difference, I know they also go after traditional Muslims, particularly their mystics (Saudi Arabia also does that towards Sunni mystics). One of the most awesome religious philosophers I've studied, Hossein Nasr, is Iranian, and he lost everything in that revolution of theirs and had to emigrate. Iran is a very scary place.
But it should be noted that Iran's scariness comes from other sources than mere Islam. The revolutionaries adopted the works of German philosopher Martin Heidegger as their political ideology. Heidegger is a genius in a lot of philosophical fields, but one in which he definitely wasn't up to speed with sanity was in his belief in Nazism. When you theocratic literalism of the Iranian revolutionary kind with that, the results are ugly.
Depends. If you are Jewish or Christian, then yeah... you get to live as a subservient member of society. If you're Bahá'í in Persia, the wonderful Islamic republic puts you on a hit list.
I don't know much about Iran or Baha'i, so I can't comment, but I remember that in the Sunni areas the criteria was broader than tolerance only towards Jews and Christians. These two are obvious cases of "people of the book" given they're explicitly mentioned as such in the Koran, but the book also says something about God sending prophets to other peoples, meaning it's open for Islamic scholars to identify those others. For example, I read a few years ago that Hindu ones (in what today is Pakistan) had, after studying the Vedas and related literature in the 17th century, concluded Hinduism, even though polytheistic, was such a case of "people of the book", hence that Hindu practitioners would be allowed to keep self-contained communities and practice their religion if at some point India were to become a Sharia country. I didn't read anything about Buddhism, but by analogy I guess the same would apply to them. In regards to Baha'i though, no idea.
It seems to me that Islam does condone (hell no, recommend) the use of violence to spread Islam.
It depends. It certainly believes that a worldwide Islamic government would be the bestest thing ever, and approves the use of force to get there, but that doesn't directly translate into forcing people to convert. Islamic countries have a long history of keeping several non-Islamic religious groups within its borders, all of them relatively untouched, unharmed, and even with self-governing rights (as long as they recognized their Islamic overlords as being the legitimate rulers, didn't dare trying to convert any Muslim to their faith, REALLY didn't dare offend Islam, and paid their special "2nd-class non-citizen" tax). So, in a way Islam had the first set of rules at something resembling "religious freedom" (as in "freedom to practice") mindset in the pre-Enlightenment world, so much so that it was quite common for European religious minorities to migrate to Islamic countries when things got really bad in Europe, kind of like when nowadays a North Korean dissident runs to China to escape oppression: from his perspective, a huge improvement; from ours, not so much. Evidently, at some point things in Europe started to improve at a faster rate than in the Middle East Islam, then surpassed them, and now we're the ones who look at them as the oppressive bad guys.
So, not so much the use of violence to spread Islam, but the use of violence to spread Sharia law, which, although a closely related subject, isn't quite the same thing.
Your logic is sound. You only fail to mention the intermediary step of, oh, I don't know, not dying of starvation? Thus managing to get to old age and then developing diseases and cancer?
Here's another nice statistic for you: 100% of assassinations and murders are linked to human beings. Let's stop the madness! Cease breeding!
Google France GMO recent news. Best way to kill people(depopulation) is through the food, water, vaccines, and pharmaceutical drugs. I don't want the kool-aid Jim Jones.
True. Which is why every day there are fewer humans on Earth!... Wait...
That's why communism is ultimately the best way to go. Only with government regulation and government work program you can expect everything to go well for everyone.
So, comrade, here it says you want one of those new "computer" things. I notice, however, that you haven't filled forms 1A to 25B showing what the social benefits arising from your possession of said "computer" would be. Please follow through in filling them and return when you're ready. Afterwards, provided all forms are correctly filled, and our revision committee agree with the social benefits described in your project, we'll add your request to the queue. How long it is? Oh, we calculate a five year wait at most, provided, of course, you keep your production levels within the required parameters of social utility. Also, don't forget to regularly attend your local political meetings, as requirements might change and this way you'll get first hand notice of any new forms in need of filling, and otherwise you might miss the submission window and be in need to restart the request procedure all over again. Needless to say, that would cause you to lose your place in the queue. Ah, you're welcome, comrade! Have a nice day too! Next!
Look how GOVERNMENT REGULATION is ruining things for the consumer again!
You've got it reversed. This is government trying to hack a fix to an earlier error: that of providing private parties monopolies over natural wireless frequencies. If that first government intervention hadn't happened, allowing instead the free market to develop technological solutions to the obvious fact that you'd have tons of people trying to use the same frequencies, then you wouldn't need such a hack. And neither the new hack down the line that will appear when this one proves problematic, and so on and so forth.
Want an actual solution? Apply the Chodorov Principle of abolishing the actual source of the problem rather than trying to fix it over and over again.
Before anyone chimes in with "Do nothing wrong and you have nothing to worry about."
Yep. That's false no matter what. This 50min video for law students at YouTube has a police officer explaining in detail every single trick their peers (and he himself) use to get confessions and convictions, even from innocent people: Dont Talk to Police. As he explains at one point, it isn't "it MIGHT be used against you", it's "it WILL be used against you". Even if you're innocent. Specially if you're innocent. Because then you'll talk, without minding your words. And then they WILL use... every... single... word... applying to them the worst, most distorted interpretation possible. Always.
A lawyer friend of mine cited a stat that on average, everyone breaks three laws per day because there are so many laws on the books. In other words, everyone is a criminal.
I don't know how it's in the USA, but a few years ago someone calculated here in Brazil we have, adding up all branches and levels of government, about 1.5 million (yes, million) laws. Most of them with tons of articles, filled with all sorts of conditions, details and the like. It's completely impossible for one to obey all of them, all of the time, simultaneously. Heck, it's probably impossible to obey even a tenth of them simultaneously, for more than 2 seconds, while sleeping. What hope is there for any normal person to not be a criminal? None!
One of the biggest fallacies in the whole bean-counting mindset. IT is more commonly a savings center.
It's worse than that. I read a few months ago that the business guru who developed the concept of "cost center vs. profit center" (Peter something, I don't remember his surname) in, if I'm not mistaken, the 1960s, abandoned it about 10 to 20 years ago as the BS concept it is, saying he was sorry for the consequences. His new thesis was a return to the previous one, something like (I quote from memory) "a business' profit center is a customer's check that doesn't bounce", i.e., as long as everything within the business is pursuing that single outcome, there's no such thing as a cost center.
As expected, MBAs and accountants haven't got the news yet. A few more decades and, who knows? Maybe they'll make their companies start doing the right thing.
Also, I've read somewhere else that some large businesses are slooowly starting to abandon another BS concept that's caused wreak and havoc all around for the last few decades: the notion that their purpose is to move the company into maximizing shareholder benefit by all means no matter what. You know, as (if it were somehow) opposed to maximizing product quality, customer loyalty and satisfaction etc. The new shocking old idea is that shareholders benefit the most when people actually like their companies and products and love consuming them.
Nothing like hitting one's head in the wall, repeatedly, to drive a point home.:-)
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Laughter is certainly a better offensive weapon than violence, right?
If only your minority group laughs while the huge majority around just looks at you confused wondering what you're talking about, I'd say it's at best ineffective.
OK, I "searched around." The evidence I've found suggests that the influence of religion on secular education is not a concern limited to either the USA or Christianity.
Those things fit within what I pointed: US cultural influence abroad. Creationism vs. Evolutionism is pretty much like Hollywood movies, spreading from the same cultural powerhouse with the same intensity.
Did you have a point you'd like to make with respect to these findings? Do you believe that it's healthy for civilization to see these beliefs growing in influence over the course of the 21st century, rather than diminishing as any sane person would have expected?
Oh, I'd say I'm indifferent. As a non-US person observing from far away, I find it all fascinating, but it really doesn't bothers me either way. It doesn't matter what you teach in school, most people will glance over biology teaching, memory whatever is required of them to pass exams, promptly forget it all the next day, and move on. As for the very few remaining ones that happen to develop an interest in the subject up to the point of entering college, they learn better anyway, be it better evolutionism, as no matter what you do it'll be badly taught in schools, or simply evolutionism at all. So, what's really the problem? Be this or be that, the end result is the same.
The sane approach then, for me, is quite simple: whoever is paying decides what their money will be used for. If in a region the paying people want teachers teaching a subject, so be it.
God only enters the picture as the bullshit reason these control freaks give for their actions, but we have long ago realized that it's the reason for the dumb. The reason for the smart has always been power.
The do the smart thing: attack the actual problem, those guy thirst for power, not the literary devices they use for rhetorical purposes while trying to get there.
The problem with atheists in general and new atheists in particular is that they don't study war doctrine, otherwise they'd know that winning is most of times a matter of a) not causing otherwise neutral parties to ally with your enemy because you made yourself seem more dangerous than them; or, better yet, b) causing those neutral parties to ally with you.
Making religion a subject of widespread mockery will be part of the solution, whether you like it or not.
Nope, because that alienates non-crazy religious individuals, who end up despising both the crazy ones as well as rationalists. Americans have this bad habit of thinking the world is like their country, when in fact if you search around the globe you'll find USA is, nowadays at least, the place from where the craziest religions and religion-branches come from. Mormonism, channeling, UFO cults, Scientology, Creationism, New Age fluff -- all of them genuine made-in-USA.
Do this: search around. You won't find a single country other than the USA where creationists have either the political power or the infiltration within Christian branches as they do over there. And there where these idiotic things seem to be gaining a foothold, such as that case with the South Korean textbooks, you'll find behind their proponents the backing of some US-based fringe group, never a native development.
This, incidentally, is why the also US-born form of aggressive atheistic rhetorics I read falls flat anywhere else where it attempts to establish itself. The effect doesn't resonate because the attack target simply isn't there.
Thus, the more you generalize, the less effective you become. Remember the adage: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Either you apply it, or they will. Go around punching who has nothing to do with the issue and, instead of hurting your real target, you'll end up hurting yourself and your own cause.
In fact I get preached to more by athiests than by any other groups
It's like a friend of mine once told me: "Atheists are very boring. All they talk about is God, God, God..."
Absolutely! I'm going to go download the Linux kernel, make my own changes to it and distribute it without providing the source code! Screw Linus and his stupid copyright!
Sure, provided I can also use your binary any way I want, including decompiling your changes and reusing them in whatever project of mine.
GPL is a clever workaround to the lack of the above right. Given that without copyright there's no advantage for a company to keep things binary-blobbed, no one would feel something missing due to lack of something like the GPL.
Obviously it's a hypothetical argument, but I can say that as an aspiring novelist, my motivation to finish my book would be lessened if I knew that even if my work went viral, I would have nothing to show for it except for a few book readings at coffee shops.
I have free, easy, unDRMed access to every single book, music, movie and TV show made in the last few years via torrent, Usenet and other means. Ask me how many of those I've read, listened or watched have been not-paid for. Answer: only those I couldn't purchase because they were locked behind idiotic geographical and similar restrictions, luckily fewer and fewer as time passes.
Your argument is simply false. In regards to a piece of content there are always three types of people: a) those who will always purchase it, b) those who will only purchase it if they don't find a way to get it for free and c) those who will never purchase it even if it's free (and who doesn't matter for this discussion). Catastrophists like you think 'a' is almost 0% while 'b' is almost 100%, and that's simply absurd. Sure, if you lose 'b' your revenue will lessen, but if anything, the last years have shown that 'a' is way, way bigger than your nightmares would like you to believe. Want a suggestion? Ignore 'b'. They aren't worth your time. Concentrate on 'a' and you'll have plenty of enjoyment in your work.
What gives google the right to scan and put up copyrighted work on their website, without the permissions of the copyright holder?
The common good.
"Leave them alone, Lieutenant. We don't have the copyright license to copy them, because the owners are long dead."
You made me remember the plot of a short story I read, I think, in an old Asimov SF magazine. Aliens come here in the stone age, become quite amazed at cave painting, a completely novel art form for them, but cannot make copies and must delete the recordings because their ethical system requires them to pay for cultural goods with some other cultural good of theirs at the same technological level, but all they have is more advanced than stone age tech, so no exchange, and no cave paintings for them. One of them however has a nice idea: giving humanity bows and arrows. The other aliens are doubtful, arguing that's quite a technological leap for humanity, which might not be ready to deal with such weapons. The other guy prevails though, with an argument akin to: "Hey, they're almost there anyway, and those paintings are soooo nice. After all, it's just bow and arrows. What could possibly go wrong?" And so they depart, with their properly purchased photos and a new art form, and in exchange we get a new, efficient and very lethal new means of war.
"Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety (RAPS)"
There's an "e" missing there. They should have gone with "Robotic Aircraft for Public Electronic Safety".
and you wish people would just leave those poor peaceful islamic peoples alone ?
Yes, because their peacefulness, or lack thereof, is theirs and their actual friends and enemies' problem, not the USA's. Let them alone and they'll have plenty of fighting among themselves to even start bothering about whatever is going on half a planet away. Keep stomping around there and you'll only give them the single, foreign, "not-like-us" enemy their worse element's rhetoric crave as a reason for uniting them.
But such a common-sensical foreign policy won't happen because the USA both need cheap oil (paying whatever their owners actually want for it, in a purely demand/offer, free market dynamics, is evidently a no-no, hence the imposing of lower prices by force) and a captive international demand for the US dollar (1 - print paper with no counterpart in goods and service; 2 - force "friendly" international oil producers to only accept said paper, causing every industrial country in the world to have a demand for it; 3 - provide said paper in exchange for actual goods and services, thus lowering and hiding the real costs of your standard of living by artificially transferring them to those countries in "need" of your printed paper; 4 - do not bother providing anything useful in return, there's no need; 5 - profit!). Hence, war, war, war, war, war...
Oh, so your inability to understand the laws is then an excuse to simply ignore them?
Actually, here in Brazil people ignoring a law is usually reason enough for it to start being ignored by law agents too. This is so common we've even developed a language expression for these cases: "The law on 'x' hasn't caught." In fact, in cases were the government is really adamant about getting people to start following a certain rule, they go about approving a similar law a few more times over a wide time span, so that one can say something to the effect of "the law on 'x' finally caught on the fourth attempt, 6 years after the previous one and 43 years after the first". And then it sometimes also happens that a law goes out of fashion for a few decades, then "caughts" again, etc.
So, anyone, business owner or not, has a fair chance of having his ignoring of a law he thinks dumb validated if enough other people follow suit. Sure, he might be unlucky enough to be chosen as an example by the government when it's trying to make the law to catch. But most often than not it won't.
There's one exception to this though: tax law. When it comes to getting money, almost nothing, not even street riots, will cause the government step back. Those are almost the only laws that "catch" no matter what.
Also, in regards to the OP's mention of Brazilian laws clusterfuckery nature, I'll give you one example. There are two main taxes on manufactured goods here, a Federal and a State ones. The mix and match of laws has made it so that you must pay the State one over the sum of the good's price plus the Federal one, *and* you must pay the Federal one over the sum of the good's price plus the State one. Yes, they iterate recursively, so that to find what you actually owe in Federal and State taxes for the good you're selling you have to apply a "lim 0->inf" over the thing. Try to explain *that* to an illiterate baker...
Who modded your [awful] analogy insightful?! :p
A better one, although still not quite fit, might be this: "...I still need to be able to regularly go into theaters and scream 'Fire', as well as publicly accuse random strangers of being pedophiles without the risk of being sued. However, this isn't allowed..."
The problem with long term data archival isn't just the storage medium -- it's being able to recreate the reader mechanism from scratch.
These are two different problems. One is how to archive things assuming the future will be technologically proficient, another is how to archive things assuming it won't. This technology is clearly geared towards the former. In a technologically proficient future, historians will certainly love having full access to the tons of small details and day-to-day stuff that can be made available for them with this, things we wouldn't dream even trying to archive in something geared towards a technologically backwards future.
The nice thing is that it isn't an either/or proposition. We can easily target both goals with different methods. Done right, the small but important stuff archived for a technological deficient future can include instructions on how to unlock the other, larger archive, even if it takes centuries for them to achieve the level of proficiency required. And then you get the best of both worlds: a retechnified future plus very happy historians.
Interestingly enough, Baha'i don't consider their prophet to be the final one - their doctrine is that God periodically sends prophets to reveal further parts of his plan, and theirs is merely the most recent in line.
Interesting indeed. It's similar to Buddhism, which believes a new Buddha arises whenever the last one's been forgotten. Or to Hinduism, with its sequence of avatars of this or that major god.
Since Baha'i claim to have a propher (Baha'u'llah) who came after Muhammad, they are blasphemers to Islam. Ditto for Ahmadis, and many others.
Well, they all operate within the framework of "the one who is going to come back". For Christians Christ is the omega, there's no one coming afterwards, only he himself coming back. But then we get Islamic scholars identify Muhammad with the Christian Paraclete. So, not much surprise in seeing others afterwards taking the role of the Mahdi, reinterpreted as *the* New Ultimate Final One(TM) -- until the next.
If I'm at my wife's funeral (stoned to death for showing her legs in public), rubbing the stump where my hand used to be (for any one of a number of "offenses"), I'm not going to quibble about the difference between violence to spread Islam, and violence to spread Sharia law.
Except that's not quite how the thing works. I don't know about the wife stoning, although I do remember the requirement is for women to use veils over their hair, and that's that (burqas are a cultural thing from some places, not others). As for the hand cutting, from what I studied of the Islamic schools of jurisprudence the rule is that it's only a valid punishment if the government provides for the the needs of the poor, thus there's absolutely no need for one to steal to stay alive, and hence that the thief's impulse to steal was 100% the result of an evil intent of his. Weren't it like this and we'd be seeing a huge amount of amputees in the news, clearly not the case.
Cyrus the Great let everybody of any religion live in peace in his kingdom. He even paid respect to the minority religions, including ordering the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple. Islam had nothing on Cyrus when it came to religious tolerance.
Well, except his policies faded, things got worse, then a LONG time afterwards the Islamic solution came around, and in a form that managed to last a fair bit more. But, yeah, I myself prefer polytheistic approaches to these issues. They have a tendency of producing less aggressive outcomes, what with the whole "you have gods? we also have gods! let's join them!" mindset. Although that's not always the case, evidently.
Then it's time you learned.
Yep. I didn't mean that Iran wasn't persecuting, only that I didn't know anything specific about the Baha'i persecution, which is only one among many persecutions that go on over there. If that makes any difference, I know they also go after traditional Muslims, particularly their mystics (Saudi Arabia also does that towards Sunni mystics). One of the most awesome religious philosophers I've studied, Hossein Nasr, is Iranian, and he lost everything in that revolution of theirs and had to emigrate. Iran is a very scary place.
But it should be noted that Iran's scariness comes from other sources than mere Islam. The revolutionaries adopted the works of German philosopher Martin Heidegger as their political ideology. Heidegger is a genius in a lot of philosophical fields, but one in which he definitely wasn't up to speed with sanity was in his belief in Nazism. When you theocratic literalism of the Iranian revolutionary kind with that, the results are ugly.
Depends. If you are Jewish or Christian, then yeah... you get to live as a subservient member of society. If you're Bahá'í in Persia, the wonderful Islamic republic puts you on a hit list.
I don't know much about Iran or Baha'i, so I can't comment, but I remember that in the Sunni areas the criteria was broader than tolerance only towards Jews and Christians. These two are obvious cases of "people of the book" given they're explicitly mentioned as such in the Koran, but the book also says something about God sending prophets to other peoples, meaning it's open for Islamic scholars to identify those others. For example, I read a few years ago that Hindu ones (in what today is Pakistan) had, after studying the Vedas and related literature in the 17th century, concluded Hinduism, even though polytheistic, was such a case of "people of the book", hence that Hindu practitioners would be allowed to keep self-contained communities and practice their religion if at some point India were to become a Sharia country. I didn't read anything about Buddhism, but by analogy I guess the same would apply to them. In regards to Baha'i though, no idea.
It seems to me that Islam does condone (hell no, recommend) the use of violence to spread Islam.
It depends. It certainly believes that a worldwide Islamic government would be the bestest thing ever, and approves the use of force to get there, but that doesn't directly translate into forcing people to convert. Islamic countries have a long history of keeping several non-Islamic religious groups within its borders, all of them relatively untouched, unharmed, and even with self-governing rights (as long as they recognized their Islamic overlords as being the legitimate rulers, didn't dare trying to convert any Muslim to their faith, REALLY didn't dare offend Islam, and paid their special "2nd-class non-citizen" tax). So, in a way Islam had the first set of rules at something resembling "religious freedom" (as in "freedom to practice") mindset in the pre-Enlightenment world, so much so that it was quite common for European religious minorities to migrate to Islamic countries when things got really bad in Europe, kind of like when nowadays a North Korean dissident runs to China to escape oppression: from his perspective, a huge improvement; from ours, not so much. Evidently, at some point things in Europe started to improve at a faster rate than in the Middle East Islam, then surpassed them, and now we're the ones who look at them as the oppressive bad guys.
So, not so much the use of violence to spread Islam, but the use of violence to spread Sharia law, which, although a closely related subject, isn't quite the same thing.
GMOs are linked to diseases and cancer.
Your logic is sound. You only fail to mention the intermediary step of, oh, I don't know, not dying of starvation? Thus managing to get to old age and then developing diseases and cancer?
Here's another nice statistic for you: 100% of assassinations and murders are linked to human beings. Let's stop the madness! Cease breeding!
Google France GMO recent news. Best way to kill people(depopulation) is through the food, water, vaccines, and pharmaceutical drugs. I don't want the kool-aid Jim Jones.
True. Which is why every day there are fewer humans on Earth! ... Wait...
That's why communism is ultimately the best way to go. Only with government regulation and government work program you can expect everything to go well for everyone.
So, comrade, here it says you want one of those new "computer" things. I notice, however, that you haven't filled forms 1A to 25B showing what the social benefits arising from your possession of said "computer" would be. Please follow through in filling them and return when you're ready. Afterwards, provided all forms are correctly filled, and our revision committee agree with the social benefits described in your project, we'll add your request to the queue. How long it is? Oh, we calculate a five year wait at most, provided, of course, you keep your production levels within the required parameters of social utility. Also, don't forget to regularly attend your local political meetings, as requirements might change and this way you'll get first hand notice of any new forms in need of filling, and otherwise you might miss the submission window and be in need to restart the request procedure all over again. Needless to say, that would cause you to lose your place in the queue. Ah, you're welcome, comrade! Have a nice day too! Next!
Look how GOVERNMENT REGULATION is ruining things for the consumer again!
You've got it reversed. This is government trying to hack a fix to an earlier error: that of providing private parties monopolies over natural wireless frequencies. If that first government intervention hadn't happened, allowing instead the free market to develop technological solutions to the obvious fact that you'd have tons of people trying to use the same frequencies, then you wouldn't need such a hack. And neither the new hack down the line that will appear when this one proves problematic, and so on and so forth.
Want an actual solution? Apply the Chodorov Principle of abolishing the actual source of the problem rather than trying to fix it over and over again.
Before anyone chimes in with "Do nothing wrong and you have nothing to worry about."
Yep. That's false no matter what. This 50min video for law students at YouTube has a police officer explaining in detail every single trick their peers (and he himself) use to get confessions and convictions, even from innocent people: Dont Talk to Police. As he explains at one point, it isn't "it MIGHT be used against you", it's "it WILL be used against you". Even if you're innocent. Specially if you're innocent. Because then you'll talk, without minding your words. And then they WILL use... every... single... word... applying to them the worst, most distorted interpretation possible. Always.
A lawyer friend of mine cited a stat that on average, everyone breaks three laws per day because there are so many laws on the books. In other words, everyone is a criminal.
I don't know how it's in the USA, but a few years ago someone calculated here in Brazil we have, adding up all branches and levels of government, about 1.5 million (yes, million) laws. Most of them with tons of articles, filled with all sorts of conditions, details and the like. It's completely impossible for one to obey all of them, all of the time, simultaneously. Heck, it's probably impossible to obey even a tenth of them simultaneously, for more than 2 seconds, while sleeping. What hope is there for any normal person to not be a criminal? None!
Everyone is a criminal, no exceptions.
One of the biggest fallacies in the whole bean-counting mindset. IT is more commonly a savings center.
It's worse than that. I read a few months ago that the business guru who developed the concept of "cost center vs. profit center" (Peter something, I don't remember his surname) in, if I'm not mistaken, the 1960s, abandoned it about 10 to 20 years ago as the BS concept it is, saying he was sorry for the consequences. His new thesis was a return to the previous one, something like (I quote from memory) "a business' profit center is a customer's check that doesn't bounce", i.e., as long as everything within the business is pursuing that single outcome, there's no such thing as a cost center.
As expected, MBAs and accountants haven't got the news yet. A few more decades and, who knows? Maybe they'll make their companies start doing the right thing.
Also, I've read somewhere else that some large businesses are slooowly starting to abandon another BS concept that's caused wreak and havoc all around for the last few decades: the notion that their purpose is to move the company into maximizing shareholder benefit by all means no matter what. You know, as (if it were somehow) opposed to maximizing product quality, customer loyalty and satisfaction etc. The new shocking old idea is that shareholders benefit the most when people actually like their companies and products and love consuming them.
Nothing like hitting one's head in the wall, repeatedly, to drive a point home. :-)