He just provided a source saying that there aren't many low skilled jobs around. No qualification. Is your assertion supposed to be true because you made the font bold?
At what point were they "robbing?" When did they cut into the inner workings of the machine to change the outcome? Is it the same as counting cards is "cheating?" Never mind that you have to have a phenomenal memory and a good grasp of probability for card counting to work. What about flying? Large hunks of aluminum don't normally fly through the air, so jet engines must be cheating physics. Right? These guys found a way to win that was completely within the rules of the game. The casinos already have the means to dealing with the cheat, you know, by fixing the machines. Why are they trying to get the money that they lost by the rules of their own game ?
The definition says 'authority,' not legal authority or moral authority. What can be meant by authority? You can be your own authority, 'censoring' your speech around children. Doesn't your boss have authority over you? Couldn't he try to censor you?
Well, yeah, I would take the measurement with a grain of salt, had the measurement been taken in the 1900s. That number was generated recently, from ice cores taken from the Arctic and Antarctic. Air gets trapped in the ice, which can be measured for content. Due to the rather consistent nature of the weather at the poles, you can correlate depth with time. The deeper the air pocket, the older it is.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide amount in 1900 was 280 ppm. Today, it is 390 ppm. For something that is supposed to be a closed cycle, that is a crazy increase.
Absorption spectra aren't relevant? Are you kidding? When have I invoked a "magic carbon sky pixie?" CO2's absorption spectra strongly includes infrared, whereas nitrogen and oxygen doesn't. Like white and black boxes in the sun, the greater the radiation absorption, the faster and hotter the object heats. CO2 absorbs more IR than O2 and N2. This is an innate physical property, due to the configuration of the electrons and nucleus of the atoms involved. More radiation absorbed means more energy, which means heat. How is this a puzzle or unclear?
Yes, CO2 absorbs infrared, more than O2 and N2. As to how... Do you know how light/radiation works at all? Do you know why the sky is blue or why a black object in the sun heats up faster than a white one? Because it doesn't seem like it. If you don't know that, how can you argue about global warming at all?
The sun's rays hit the earth. the earth translates the radiation in to infrared. CO2 absorbs infrared and heats up. Thus, a warmer planet. Like a car in the parking lot allows sunlight in, but doesn't let heat out. Wikipedia article. Rather than complain that no one can explain it to you, maybe you should try explaining it to yourself?
I feel that your position is wrongheaded and nearsighted. I feel that the position stems from your own, very wrong and unrealistic, beliefs. I actually believe that with some thought, these feelings are correct and self-evident. I did not "twist" what you said. I am attempting to demonstrate. I simply restated on simpler terms and you found the statement distasteful. Why? You are the one who brought up morality. Exactly how did I change the original meaning? You have taken an all-or-nothing approach to this discussion. This repeal does nothing for you and you construe it to help your enemy. You have some mythical big picture where the government plays us all as pawns and this repeal is a ploy to distract us. Exactly how will we become distracted? Is the HRC going to close up tomorrow? Are you and I going to stop voting and donating as our conscience sees fit? What does American imperialism have to do with DADT? Do you blame the hammer for the hole in the wall? Gays and lesbians, thousands of them, will someday soon, be able to go to work and not have to lie about how they spent their weekend. How is this repeal anything other than a good thing? You change what you can and work on what you can't. I am asking you to defend your position and you use buzzwords and false equivalencies. Wordy false equivalencies.
I am interested. I'm sorry I offended. How would you describe your previous post?
No, I want equal rights, full stop. Human rights, civil rights, the whole nine yards. Getting the one while disregarding the other is not a moral position.
How else can you rephrase that? That is basically saying that doing good in the name of evil isn't good.
You are an idiot. 99% of rapists are men. Maybe women have a reason to not want to share a bathroom with us, other than "it feels weird."
Why don't we have polygamy? So long as we have polyandry too and everyone is consenting adults, why not? Bestiality is a different animal all together. Your horse can't say yes or no and, before you bring it up, neither can children. Consent is the issue. If everyone is an adult and of sound mind, why do you get to impose your sexual mores on them?
Actually, to be tangential, if a man and women is caught in an indelicate position in the park, they are more likely to be let off with a warning, whereas if it is two men, their names get in the paper.
To your main point, I understand what you are saying. I agree with most of what you said. Get the government out of the marriage business. However, your information on how the military works seems a little out of date. Women do now serve in the same units as men. It is frowned upon to sleep with members of your unit, but so long as it is not fraternization, it is not expressly forbidden. Some units I knew were downright incestuous, every possible straight combination had been tried. I'm not saying that it is a good thing, just something that happens. When gays are allowed to serve openly, why not treat them like straight couples? If a gay couple gets a civil union, why not separate them into different commands and assign them the same duty stations?
Not even sexual interests. How about normal day-to-day stuff like "I had a fight with the significant other." If your SO is the same sex, you can't talk about that.
Okay, I get that. So your civil rights are forest fires, while the civil rights of gays in the military are private swimming pools? You want equal rights, but their choices aren't right choices and should be disregarded as not part of the movement?
A man's beliefs are fundamental in forming his opinions. That is why I brought it up. I deduced that you were at least a libertarian and/or a pacifist because of your dismissal of this repeal. A man who disagrees with his government's actions wouldn't have decided that it means nothing. He may have considered it a small step, but not nothing or, as you seem to see it, a setback. Who we are and what we believe has everything to do with how and what we argue.
Men don't shower together in the military! This "shower together" meme is stupid, yet rich with homoerotic subtext. Is that what people think of the military? All day, a bunch of guys getting wet and soapy under a stream of hot water? I was in the Marines and the only time there was a group shower was the 3 months of boot camp, where you are so sick and exhausted, EVERY DAY, that you don't even wake up with a morning boner, much less have the energy to perv on guys in the shower. Everywhere else there are individual showers. I was on a tiny FOB in northern Iraq, living in tents and we built a shower stall, rather than some sort of group shower. Why are straight men afraid to shower with gay guys anyway? Women have good reason to be leery of showering with guys. Aren't 99% of rapist men? Combine that statistic with the physical shape a man is required to be in while in the military and women don't stand a huge chance of resisting, do they? I found on Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt, that 15% of the women coming back from the current wars and going to the hospital have been doing so because of "sexual trauma." Sounds like women have a good reason to be afraid of straight men. What good reason do straight men have to be afraid of the gays?
You used a lot of big words and I was worried that I might have missed something. Now that I am assured of my understanding, I am free to say that I disagree with your assertion that this repeal is not meaningful. It may mean nothing to you, but it means a lot to those affected by DADT. Civil rights are not a binary bit, civil rights or no civil rights. The fight for civil rights is like fighting a forest fire. You have to stamp out what you can, when you can. Also, I find it saddening that you think so little of those who work for equal rights, that you believe that they can be distracted from the ultimate goal of equality for all, with what you feel is a little sop. I understand your disaffection for the government and their manipulation of the people. It makes me angry too, but I sense at the end of your sentiment the belief that we can do without government and a military is immoral. That may be me putting words in your mouth though. All life is based on struggle. We as humans are in a nearly unique position to transcend that struggle, but we must acknowledge that we are nowhere near that position yet. Sometimes I feel like we are falling further from that goal. Until we get there, we will need mediation for conflict. The government is needed for peaceful disagreement, the military when that disagreement gets not-so peaceful. We need a government, we need a military. However, there may be imperfections that need fixed.
I don't think I understood your comment. What I got was "the government uses segregation and prejudice to control the masses, allowing the government to continue waging wars that would otherwise be stopped by a union of the people." Is that the first part? I believe that the next bit boiled down to "the repeal will only help the government whitewash its warmongering actions and distract social crusaders from issues that matter. The military is bad and this is self-evident." Is that everything?
The simple answer is that the military isn't always on the battlefield and people's lives in the military are significantly more entwined than co-workers at a civilian job. You live with the people you work with. You go to bars with them and get roaring drunk with them. They invite you to their parties and weddings. The bosses make sure everybody has a place to go on Thanksgiving and Christmas. A lot of the time, your co-workers are the only people who speak the same language as you.
"Don't ask, don't tell" full name is "Don't ask, don't tell, don't harass, don't pursue." Until it was passed, someone could make a complaint to the relevant authority that you were a homosexual and the authority, such as NCIS, was obliged to investigate and determine if, in fact, you were a homosexual. If they believed(not proved) that you were a homosexual, you were then dishonorable discharged, under a special code. The code would show up when your prospective employer checked and would tell them that you were a homosexual. How would an employer react to finding out you were a homosexual pre-nineties?
"Don't ask, don't tell" was a compromise. It put an end to the proactive investigations, military police searching your room for proof on someone else's word. It did not end the discrimination, for if you were caught doing something homosexual, for example, holding hands or kissing or hanging out in a gay bar (which they, to this day, raid) that person was obligated to testify against you to have you discharged. That is just the legalese version. Have you every talked about your significant other while at work? Can you imagine being forbidden from doing so? Can you imagine meeting everybody's girlfriends and wives, but if you even have the courage to bring yours (which most of the time you don't) you can only introduce yours as "a good friend?" That is what "Don't ask, don't tell" is. It let us homos serve, so long as we act sexless. I'm not saying that we should be allowed to have gay sex on a table in the chow hall during lunch, but it would have been nice to go on a date to a nice restaurant without taking a group of friends as "cover."
"Don't ask, don't tell" forces gays and lesbians to separate their lives in a way that straights don't worry about. That is why it was homophobic. It averted some persecution, but it gave no freedom.
A diploma is easily verifiable, whereas "3-5 years of relevant experience" is not. Not that it matters, these days they ask for a diploma AND three to five years of experience.
We don't do this because people are idiots. Without the immediacy of danger, people get complacent. We may be one of the few species on the planet to think about the future, but that doesn't mean we are any good at it.
Slashdot Mirror
He just provided a source saying that there aren't many low skilled jobs around. No qualification. Is your assertion supposed to be true because you made the font bold?
At what point were they "robbing?" When did they cut into the inner workings of the machine to change the outcome? Is it the same as counting cards is "cheating?" Never mind that you have to have a phenomenal memory and a good grasp of probability for card counting to work. What about flying? Large hunks of aluminum don't normally fly through the air, so jet engines must be cheating physics. Right? These guys found a way to win that was completely within the rules of the game. The casinos already have the means to dealing with the cheat, you know, by fixing the machines. Why are they trying to get the money that they lost by the rules of their own game ?
The definition says 'authority,' not legal authority or moral authority. What can be meant by authority? You can be your own authority, 'censoring' your speech around children. Doesn't your boss have authority over you? Couldn't he try to censor you?
Well, yeah, I would take the measurement with a grain of salt, had the measurement been taken in the 1900s. That number was generated recently, from ice cores taken from the Arctic and Antarctic. Air gets trapped in the ice, which can be measured for content. Due to the rather consistent nature of the weather at the poles, you can correlate depth with time. The deeper the air pocket, the older it is.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide amount in 1900 was 280 ppm. Today, it is 390 ppm. For something that is supposed to be a closed cycle, that is a crazy increase.
Absorption spectra aren't relevant? Are you kidding? When have I invoked a "magic carbon sky pixie?" CO2's absorption spectra strongly includes infrared, whereas nitrogen and oxygen doesn't. Like white and black boxes in the sun, the greater the radiation absorption, the faster and hotter the object heats. CO2 absorbs more IR than O2 and N2. This is an innate physical property, due to the configuration of the electrons and nucleus of the atoms involved. More radiation absorbed means more energy, which means heat. How is this a puzzle or unclear?
Yes, CO2 absorbs infrared, more than O2 and N2. As to how... Do you know how light/radiation works at all? Do you know why the sky is blue or why a black object in the sun heats up faster than a white one? Because it doesn't seem like it. If you don't know that, how can you argue about global warming at all?
The sun's rays hit the earth. the earth translates the radiation in to infrared. CO2 absorbs infrared and heats up. Thus, a warmer planet. Like a car in the parking lot allows sunlight in, but doesn't let heat out. Wikipedia article. Rather than complain that no one can explain it to you, maybe you should try explaining it to yourself?
how did gay troops distract you in 2008? How would they distract now?
What did he do?
I feel that your position is wrongheaded and nearsighted. I feel that the position stems from your own, very wrong and unrealistic, beliefs. I actually believe that with some thought, these feelings are correct and self-evident. I did not "twist" what you said. I am attempting to demonstrate. I simply restated on simpler terms and you found the statement distasteful. Why? You are the one who brought up morality. Exactly how did I change the original meaning? You have taken an all-or-nothing approach to this discussion. This repeal does nothing for you and you construe it to help your enemy. You have some mythical big picture where the government plays us all as pawns and this repeal is a ploy to distract us. Exactly how will we become distracted? Is the HRC going to close up tomorrow? Are you and I going to stop voting and donating as our conscience sees fit? What does American imperialism have to do with DADT? Do you blame the hammer for the hole in the wall? Gays and lesbians, thousands of them, will someday soon, be able to go to work and not have to lie about how they spent their weekend. How is this repeal anything other than a good thing? You change what you can and work on what you can't. I am asking you to defend your position and you use buzzwords and false equivalencies. Wordy false equivalencies.
I am interested. I'm sorry I offended. How would you describe your previous post?
How else can you rephrase that? That is basically saying that doing good in the name of evil isn't good.
You are an idiot. 99% of rapists are men. Maybe women have a reason to not want to share a bathroom with us, other than "it feels weird."
Why don't we have polygamy? So long as we have polyandry too and everyone is consenting adults, why not? Bestiality is a different animal all together. Your horse can't say yes or no and, before you bring it up, neither can children. Consent is the issue. If everyone is an adult and of sound mind, why do you get to impose your sexual mores on them?
I'm a little lost. So the military is doing evil, so is therefore evil. Enabling gays to join evil is an evil, so this repeal is evil?
Actually, to be tangential, if a man and women is caught in an indelicate position in the park, they are more likely to be let off with a warning, whereas if it is two men, their names get in the paper.
To your main point, I understand what you are saying. I agree with most of what you said. Get the government out of the marriage business. However, your information on how the military works seems a little out of date. Women do now serve in the same units as men. It is frowned upon to sleep with members of your unit, but so long as it is not fraternization, it is not expressly forbidden. Some units I knew were downright incestuous, every possible straight combination had been tried. I'm not saying that it is a good thing, just something that happens. When gays are allowed to serve openly, why not treat them like straight couples? If a gay couple gets a civil union, why not separate them into different commands and assign them the same duty stations?
Not even sexual interests. How about normal day-to-day stuff like "I had a fight with the significant other." If your SO is the same sex, you can't talk about that.
15% of the women in VA hospitals coming back from the wars are there from rape. I think women have a pretty good reason to not want coed showers.
Okay, I get that. So your civil rights are forest fires, while the civil rights of gays in the military are private swimming pools? You want equal rights, but their choices aren't right choices and should be disregarded as not part of the movement?
A man's beliefs are fundamental in forming his opinions. That is why I brought it up. I deduced that you were at least a libertarian and/or a pacifist because of your dismissal of this repeal. A man who disagrees with his government's actions wouldn't have decided that it means nothing. He may have considered it a small step, but not nothing or, as you seem to see it, a setback. Who we are and what we believe has everything to do with how and what we argue.
Men don't shower together in the military! This "shower together" meme is stupid, yet rich with homoerotic subtext. Is that what people think of the military? All day, a bunch of guys getting wet and soapy under a stream of hot water? I was in the Marines and the only time there was a group shower was the 3 months of boot camp, where you are so sick and exhausted, EVERY DAY, that you don't even wake up with a morning boner, much less have the energy to perv on guys in the shower. Everywhere else there are individual showers. I was on a tiny FOB in northern Iraq, living in tents and we built a shower stall, rather than some sort of group shower. Why are straight men afraid to shower with gay guys anyway? Women have good reason to be leery of showering with guys. Aren't 99% of rapist men? Combine that statistic with the physical shape a man is required to be in while in the military and women don't stand a huge chance of resisting, do they? I found on Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt, that 15% of the women coming back from the current wars and going to the hospital have been doing so because of "sexual trauma." Sounds like women have a good reason to be afraid of straight men. What good reason do straight men have to be afraid of the gays?
You used a lot of big words and I was worried that I might have missed something. Now that I am assured of my understanding, I am free to say that I disagree with your assertion that this repeal is not meaningful. It may mean nothing to you, but it means a lot to those affected by DADT. Civil rights are not a binary bit, civil rights or no civil rights. The fight for civil rights is like fighting a forest fire. You have to stamp out what you can, when you can. Also, I find it saddening that you think so little of those who work for equal rights, that you believe that they can be distracted from the ultimate goal of equality for all, with what you feel is a little sop. I understand your disaffection for the government and their manipulation of the people. It makes me angry too, but I sense at the end of your sentiment the belief that we can do without government and a military is immoral. That may be me putting words in your mouth though. All life is based on struggle. We as humans are in a nearly unique position to transcend that struggle, but we must acknowledge that we are nowhere near that position yet. Sometimes I feel like we are falling further from that goal. Until we get there, we will need mediation for conflict. The government is needed for peaceful disagreement, the military when that disagreement gets not-so peaceful. We need a government, we need a military. However, there may be imperfections that need fixed.
I don't think I understood your comment. What I got was "the government uses segregation and prejudice to control the masses, allowing the government to continue waging wars that would otherwise be stopped by a union of the people." Is that the first part? I believe that the next bit boiled down to "the repeal will only help the government whitewash its warmongering actions and distract social crusaders from issues that matter. The military is bad and this is self-evident." Is that everything?
The simple answer is that the military isn't always on the battlefield and people's lives in the military are significantly more entwined than co-workers at a civilian job. You live with the people you work with. You go to bars with them and get roaring drunk with them. They invite you to their parties and weddings. The bosses make sure everybody has a place to go on Thanksgiving and Christmas. A lot of the time, your co-workers are the only people who speak the same language as you.
"Don't ask, don't tell" full name is "Don't ask, don't tell, don't harass, don't pursue." Until it was passed, someone could make a complaint to the relevant authority that you were a homosexual and the authority, such as NCIS, was obliged to investigate and determine if, in fact, you were a homosexual. If they believed(not proved) that you were a homosexual, you were then dishonorable discharged, under a special code. The code would show up when your prospective employer checked and would tell them that you were a homosexual. How would an employer react to finding out you were a homosexual pre-nineties?
"Don't ask, don't tell" was a compromise. It put an end to the proactive investigations, military police searching your room for proof on someone else's word. It did not end the discrimination, for if you were caught doing something homosexual, for example, holding hands or kissing or hanging out in a gay bar (which they, to this day, raid) that person was obligated to testify against you to have you discharged. That is just the legalese version. Have you every talked about your significant other while at work? Can you imagine being forbidden from doing so? Can you imagine meeting everybody's girlfriends and wives, but if you even have the courage to bring yours (which most of the time you don't) you can only introduce yours as "a good friend?" That is what "Don't ask, don't tell" is. It let us homos serve, so long as we act sexless. I'm not saying that we should be allowed to have gay sex on a table in the chow hall during lunch, but it would have been nice to go on a date to a nice restaurant without taking a group of friends as "cover."
"Don't ask, don't tell" forces gays and lesbians to separate their lives in a way that straights don't worry about. That is why it was homophobic. It averted some persecution, but it gave no freedom.
it is blatantly apparent that homosexuality is a destructive aspect to the species
exactly how is it apparent?
A diploma is easily verifiable, whereas "3-5 years of relevant experience" is not. Not that it matters, these days they ask for a diploma AND three to five years of experience.
We don't do this because people are idiots. Without the immediacy of danger, people get complacent. We may be one of the few species on the planet to think about the future, but that doesn't mean we are any good at it.