>> ^blankfist:

>> ^marbles:
>> ^ChaosEngine:
@marbles
How does this system protect your rights from those who would infringe on it, perhaps indirectly? Who arbitrates in disputes?
For example, I have a property with trees on it. Every fall I gather up the leaves in a big pile and burn them. Leaving aside wider environmental concerns, my neighbour tells me the smoke from my leaf pile is blackening his house. There is no benefit to me in not burning the leaves, so I tell him to get stuffed.
Your system is hypothetically great, but it falls down in the real world.

It's not a system, it's a philosophy. Hopefully whatever system you subscribe to adheres to the protection of liberty.

This is what they don't get. That it's NOT a system. Wasting your breath. I've been spinning my wheels with the same people on here for nearly 4 years.


Why the hostility? I asked a legitimate question.

As to your response, a system is essentially the application of a philosophy. My philosophy shapes my actions, and those actions when repeated for a given situation constitute a system. Thought without action is meaningless.

My system (such as it is) involves compromising the common good and individual liberty. It is a constant trade off between the good of the many and the rights of the few. Each case is weighed on it's merits and I make a decision based on that. In some cases, I favour individual liberty (e.g. I don't believe the "threat of terrorism" warrants onerous security measures) and in some cases I favour the common good (e.g. where I live you cannot have an open fire as a home heating source for clean air regs). Democracy allows me to have a say in how these lines are drawn. A lot of the time I don't agree with the decisions and there are cases where I believe that even a democratic majority does not constitute a moral mandate (slavery in the 1800's, gay marriage in the 21st century and so on).

So I will rephrase my question: given a situation where two parties acting within their rights infringe on the rights over others, how do you apply your philosophy here?

[redacted]

i think you've clearly missed the point of the various holy books. theyre not science books. theyre not history books. its no different than taking any philosophical or theological book, ancient or modern, and calling bullshit on account of it not mentioning some far off nebula as if that means anything as it pertains to philosophy and/or theology

"why not mention something like, 'god created the stars, including the sun'? then people would be like oh, all those points of light are just different versions of our sun" why not? because what the hell does that have to do with the philosophical nature of the scriptures?

again, you want it to be a science book but its not and why should it be?
>> ^Mcboinkens:

>> ^shimfish:
Err...except for all the times the bible mentions stars, which, of course, we used to actually see at night.
Were you expecting a postscript along the lines of "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
>> ^Mcboinkens:
This is one of my biggest conflicts with religion. Not one mention of anything outside of the sun and the moon.


Errrrrr.......you clearly missed the point of my post. No mention of anything humans didn't already know about. If I created a full-fledged universe, I'd definitely hint at the fact that there were other things outside of the Earth, Moon, and points of light that are blatantly obvious. Also, it seems to differentiate between the Sun and stars. Why not mention something like, "God created the stars, including the Sun"? Then people would be like oh, all those points of light are just different versions of our Sun. "In 1600 A.D., Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy, for asserting that the Sun is a star, among other things. It wasn't until the mid-1800s, after the work of Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, Newton, and finally, Friedrich Bessel, that it[meaning the sun was a strar] could be proven. The distance to other stars was calculated, and it was found that stars were about as bright as the Sun, when you account for the difference in distance. Also, chemical composition and surface temperature could be determined, and this added further evidence."
It mentions Pleiades and Orion, both of which received there name prior to when the book of Job was written, so no credit there. Besides, those are just constellations.
Why would you not expect any sort of indication that space was bigger than we though? Why leave us in the dark? Why not reveal that the Earth is a globe and not a flatland, like it implies when it mentions the four corners?
"The Third Day
The first appearance of dry ground. The further cooling of the surface set in motion a process of natural contraction, uplifting and motion of the crust (the process continues today, called "plate tectonics"). The earth changed from a smooth one-level molten "cue ball" to a planet with an irregular surface with ocean basins and continental landmasses. With dry ground available, the first plants were made to grow in great abundance. (Genesis 1:9-13)
The Fourth Day
With the sky now clear, the sun, moon and stars were dependably visible. They were to "serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years." The sun marked the day (sunset to sunset), the moon the month (new moon to new moon), and the stars the seasons (constellations are seen in particular seasons e.g. "Orion" is visible in winter in the northern hemisphere, which is summer in the southern hemisphere). (Genesis 1:14-19)"
A mention of dirt, but not gas? It just bugs me that the only things mentioned were the things that were already known about.

[redacted]

Too me Brink felt alittle to stiff, not as smooth as they pictured it to be.

However, Im at 1800 hours played of Team Fortress 2...

I'm terribly late to the party, but I can't resist commenting here. This is a wonderful post with loads of great ideas and comments. I'll go bullet style like all the cool kids are doing.

* Taxation of individuals, and more to the point enforcement of individual tax laws, comes down to prioritization. Morally, it may feel better to want the IRS to tackle the super rich, but financially, it is in fact more beneficial to audit those less capable of evasion. If the IRS can spend $5k to get $10k from several individuals, that is fiscally more useful than spending millions going after one individual that can indefinitely avoid settling up. Corporations, on the other hand, are another matter entirely. Corporations are given the rights of citizens, like free speech, due process, etc., but are not expected to fulfill the same obligations in terms of taxes, being honest with law enforcement, being eligible for military service, voting, etc. That's a whole other can of worms opened up by the SCOTUS back in the 1800s. The answer lies in removing the citizen like rights of corporations, but that's not going to happen in our lifetimes.

* Welfare serves the dual purpose of helping those who have been screwed over by circumstance and those who have been screwed over by the system. It is something that the vast majority of right wingers will claim is better served by private charities, which are invariably faith based. Even AA is a religious organization. And every person that subscribes to a faith of one sort or another will tell you that nearly all charities are faith based. You know why? Because its virtually impossible to get non-profit status and wide recognition for an organization unless it is faith based. That historical/cultural bias is reason enough for me to justify a secular/communal charity system.

* Conventional nuclear power is great, assuming it is done safely. That's the problem, though - is it economically viable to maintain conventional nuclear power plants safely? None of the arguments I've seen on either side of the issue really deal with that aspect. It basically comes down to a matter of risk management, which TEPCO clearly failed at. Implementing conventional nuclear power safely requires a really absurd amount capital, but it may be economically smart at a large enough scale. Figuring out the economics of safe nuclear power is way above my pay grade. Ultimately, I believe it is something humans are quite capable of doing, but is there enough political will to do it properly?

* Free markets are awesome! Don't confuse free markets with capitalist bullying, though. A free market assumes that everyone in the market has the same information as everyone else. That's the only way it can actually be free. As soon as one party manipulates the information available to others, the market is no longer free. That applies to everything from snake oil remedies to irresponsible mortgages. A free market doesn't mean a market free of regulation, it means one in which everyone has equal access to the marketplace, producers and consumers alike.

* Small government, or even no government, is ideal because ideally everyone thinks like you do, and has exactly the same minimal requirements that you have. In the real world, the needs of individuals in very large social groups are immensely varied. You may live your whole life without ever needing the services of a fire department. You may not ever need to protect yourself from a psychopathic killer. Hell, you may run your own website from your home and never do more than walk your kids along a deer path to a private school near you. But you are a part of a society. Your kids' teacher may live 50 miles away and need to travel along paved roads to get to that wonderful school. The web of internetworked computers upon which your income relies was first conceived by people working at public institutions. The smallpox vaccination you got as a kid was developed by a tax funded group of doctors. The nuclear power that you want to support would never have been possible without vast amounts of federal funding. Bureaucratic and corruption waste is not unique to government, and any properly organized system can minimize waste. It's not the idea of government, but its implementation that makes it wasteful. Corporations are no more immune to that waste than any other collective. It's true that waste is easier to identify and possibly eliminate in smaller systems, but very large organizational systems are required for big results like space travel, vaccinations, and imperial domination.

* Do not confuse religion with spirituality. Religion is about dogma and social control. Spirituality is about one's connection with the universe. If your neighbor believes in a grey bearded man in the sky that created everything 6000 years ago, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with his desire to eliminate the teaching of evolution from public schools. He may use the former to justify the latter, but the two are not really connected. If someone comes to your door offering a deeper connection with the universe around you through Jesus, you can listen politely, tell them that you are already plugged in, or whatever. If someone comes to your door to tell you that you and your family need to behave in a certain way, you can tell them to fuck off with a quite clear conscience.

I don't think any of these ideas are young or old, but it does take some time to refine them into something coherent. I'm 41 and I barely know what coherent or consistent means. One last thing to remember is that you are not who you were 10 years ago, or even 10 seconds ago. Every moment fresh water flows over the fall - it might look the same, but the rocks are never touched twice. (oh - now I'm just getting pretentious)

It wouldn't have mattered at the time who justified the war for the US/UK. They wanted justification to make their war right. As was written about 1800 years ago:

"If you attack evils based on social trends, no one can rival your dignity. If you settle victory with the power of the people, no one can rival your achievement. If you can accurately discern these basis of action, and add dignity and faith to them, you can take on the most formidable opponent and prevail over the most valiant adversary" [Mastering the Art of War. Liang, Zhuge p71]

Unfortunately, they did not understand the true meaning of this. This passage isn't about justifying a war to ensure you win.

the piece itself was made in the 1800s.

expand your mind, man.

fo reel.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^Trancecoach:
a marvelous vintage piece.

Vintage is for footage from the 70s and older so I'm quite confident this doesn't qualify.
nochannel art history engineering

From what I know, those zircaloy fuel rods melt at around 1800-2200°C, not 1200°C as suggested in this clip. If I'm not mistaken, the hydrogen explosions might be a direct result of oxidation of those zircaloy rods, thus indicating a partial meltdown simply through the existence of vast amounts of hydrogen.

@Psychologic
If it wasn't irreparable once the fuel rods started melting, it sure as hell turned into scrap the second they inserted sea water.

@Ornthoron
The third containment layer, the reinforced concrete bubble, won't stop the molten sludge made of uranium and zircaloy indefinatly. From what I know, it's a matter of days at best, if enough rods have melted down. If the entire load melts, if a complete meltdown occurs, that's 60+ tons of uranium alone. No concrete or steel will stop that unless it is cooled externally. That's why they use a large area of graphite-concrete composite material as a core-catcher in EPRs and others.

Ok, I get that this is an important documentary, but 30 hours of promote time in 5 days is overkill. Enough already. Everyone that's interested in watching this has. Nearly 1800 views, and over 160 unique member views.

>> ^desertdragon:

At least these folks fish the tuna sustainably, as evidenced by the fact that they've been doing it this way for nearly 2000 years. It's the giant commercial factory fishers that have decimated the tuna population over the last fifty years


No single group of fisherman can be said to fish sustainably if the rest are fishing to extinction. Sure it's traditional, but if everyone still hunts the blue fin, even if they all use this method, the practice is only sustainable if the total tuna fished in a year is less than or equal to the rate of reproduction in the species, no matter how long it takes the species to decline. In any case it's only in the past 150 years that industrial fishing has been making a dent on fish stocks, but most noticeably in the past 50 or so. So yeah, for 1800 years prior to that it didn't matter how you fished, it was sustainable because there weren't enough of us eating fish.

Apparently certain Japanese love blue fin so much that they are freezing it to build up stocks so that once it goes extinct they can sell it at extreme profit. Hurrah for capitalism!

The left is shocked---SHOCKED I TELLS YA----about any suggestions of media-promoted VIOLENCE!

To wit:


A new low in Bush-hatred

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
September 10, 2006

SIX YEARS into the Bush administration, are there any new depths to which the Bush-haters can sink?

George W. Bush has been smeared by the left with every insult imaginable. He has been called a segregationist who yearns to revive Jim Crow and compared ad nauseam to Adolf Hitler. His detractors have accused him of being financially entwined with Osama bin Laden. Of presiding over an American gulag. Of being a latter-day Mussolini. Howard Dean has proffered the "interesting theory" that the Saudis tipped off Bush in advance about 9/11. One US senator (Ted Kennedy) has called the war in Iraq a "fraud" that Bush "cooked up in Texas" for political gain; another (Vermont independent James Jeffords) has charged him with planning a war in Iran as a strategy to put his brother in the White House. Cindy Sheehan has called him a "lying bastard," a "filth spewer," an "evil maniac," a "fuehrer," and a "terrorist" guilty of "blatant genocide" -- and been rewarded for her invective with oceans of media attention.

What's left for them to say about Bush? That they want him killed?

They already say it.

On Air America Radio, talk show host Randi Rhodes recommended doing to Bush what Michael Corleone, in "The Godfather, Part II," does to his brother. "Like Fredo," she said, "somebody ought to take him out fishing and phuw!" -- then she imitated the sound of a gunshot. In the Guardian, a leading British daily, columnist Charlie Brooker issued a plea: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. -- where are you now that we need you?"

For the more literary Bush-hater, there is "Checkpoint," a novel by Nicholson Baker in which two characters discuss the wisdom of shooting the 43rd president. "I'm going to kill that bastard," one character fumes. Some Bush-hatred masquerades as art: At Chicago's Columbia College, a curated exhibit included a sheet of mock postage stamps bearing the words "Patriot Act" and depicting President Bush with a gun to his head. There are even Bush-assassination fashion statements, such as the "KILL BUSH" T-shirts that were on offer last year at CafePress, an online retailer.

Lurid political libels have a long history in American life. The lies told about John Adams in the campaign of 1800 were vile enough, his wife Abigail lamented, "to ruin and corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world." But has there ever been a president so hated by his enemies that they lusted openly for his death? Or tried to gratify that lust with such political pornography?

As with other kinds of porn, even the most graphic expressions of Bush-hatred tend to jade those who gorge on it, so that they crave ever more explicit material to achieve the same effect.

Which brings us to "Death of a President," a new movie about the assassination of George W. Bush.

Written and directed by British filmmaker Gabriel Range, the movie premieres this week at the Toronto Film Festival and will air next month on Britain's Channel 4. Shot in the style of a documentary, it opens with what looks like actual footage of Bush being gunned down by a sniper as he leaves a Chicago hotel in October 2007. Through the use of digital special effects, the film superimposes the president's face onto the body of the actor playing him, so that the mortally wounded man collapsing on the screen will seem, all too vividly, to be Bush himself.

This is Bush-hatred as a snuff film. The fantasies it feeds are grotesque and obscene; to pander to such fantasies is to rip at boundary-markers that are indispensable to civilized society. That such a movie could not only be made but lionized at an international film festival is a mark not of sophistication, but of a sickness in modern life that should alarm conservatives and liberals alike.

Naturally that's not how the film's promoters see it. Noah Cowan, one of the Toronto festival's co-directors, high-mindedly describes "Death of a President" as "a classic cautionary tale." Well, yes, he says, Bush's assassination is "harrowing," but what the film is really about is "how the Patriot Act, especially, and how Bush's divisive partisanship and race-baiting has forever altered America."

I can't help wondering, though, whether some of those who see this film will take away rather a different message. John Hinckley, in his derangement, had the idea that shooting the president was the way to impress a movie star. After seeing "Death of a President," the next Hinckley may be taken with a more grandiose idea: that shooting the president is the way to become a movie star.

>> ^MaxWilder:

This actually shed a lot of light on a lot of questions I had. I have not at all made up my mind on the subject, and I welcome anyone who would like to argue against the points made in this video.


If you have a lot of questions, history books are a better starting place than a blatantly biased video like this. I made it to minute 6 before the outright lies and falsehoods were more than I needed to know this video was not worth more of my time.

The very opening claim of the video declares Israel has always, since before it's inception seen no legitimate claim for any other people in Palestine except their fellow Jewish people. Historical fact is that in 1948, when the fledgling UN recommended a partition of Palestine into two states, Israel accepted the borders and declared independence. This could have been the end of the civil war in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It wasn't the Zionists that where aggressive at this point. The entirety of the Arab world declared a united war against the new state of Israel, trumpeting that they would drive them into the sea. My description here is not in question either within the Arab world, Al-Jazeera has an article covering all these points in even more detail.

Now the video decides around the 6 minute mark to contradict itself:
At the end of the 19th century, there were hardly any Jews living in Palestine.
And yet, the video just finished telling us in the introduction that historically Jews and Arabs had been getting along famously. We might wonder how that is imagined to have happened if there were hardly any Jews there to get along with?

Historians largely say the best guess at populations in 1900 Palestine are not possible, and largely inaccurate. The closest commitment they make is to sate there was a significant Arab majority, but also that the Jewish population was by far the most significant minority in the region. Enough so that it is well agreed, even by anti-Zionist pro-Arab sources that the city of Jerusalem itself has had a Jewish majority since the very late 1800's.

So, the video has started by lying about the basic facts of how many Jews where in Palestine when the conflicts started, and about their willingness to accept a rather reasonable partition of the country. Useful answers and insights aren't likely forthcoming from a source like that.

@xxovercastxx

True, but the "i before e" thing has been around since the 1800s, so I'd bet there were fewer loaner words at the time.

@robbersdog49

Yes, I share most of his views. There's a difference between knowing and not caring and using words incorrectly out of ignorance. As someone (possibly on sift) said recently, these conventions are the difference between saying stuff like, "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse" and "I helped my uncle jack off a horse". One capital letter is all you need to get wrong to possibly confuse the hell out of someone. Did you help your uncle kill or masturbate a horse? Possibly important info.

I saw a sign today that said "Welcome hockey fan's!" Hockey fan's what?

Taco Bell is full of signs that say "WHY PAY MORE!". That sentence is a question.

These are things done out of ignorance/laziness. They're understandable and forgivable. I notice them being wrong, so it's slightly annoying and I'd fix it if I had the chance, but whatever. Purposely enjoying and playing with language is highly enjoyable. I change nouns into verbs all the time. On the other hand, sounding like an idiot in an email can cost you a job, etc. It's usually obvious which is the case (ignorance or being playful) and I always prefer the action done from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance.

Haha. What would you do without us? Well, in the early 1800s you'd probably not be a slave, so there's that.