I'm not sure if you actually disagree or just misunderstand. I have no issue with fantasy, except when it's put in place of reality. I enjoyed LOTR and Hobbit, and I even want to see Pacific Rim (although I must admit I'm embarrassed about it). When fantasy replaces history, history is lost.
When you tell a story that's historical in nature, I (and many others) feel you have an obligation to your audience to teach them the actual history, not to bastardize and fictionalize it with fantasy and Neo. I'm sorry if you feel that way of thinking makes me a jerk, it wasn't what I was going for. I feel it makes me an adult that is unapologetic about being interested in amazing history more than flashy fantasy.
My point about Lincoln has been ignored or misunderstood...would you have liked to see him fight a confederate dragon? Would that have added to, or detracted from the compelling adult story being told? Was Lincoln Vampire Hunter as good a movie as Lincoln in any way? Did the addition of Vampires help you understand the person or time period, or would it have confused you about the historical facts if you knew nothing about the subject(s)?
I understand 300 was not meant to be historical, but it has the same issues with adding fantasy and drama to a well known, historical story. This is a big pet peeve of mine, as I feel most people have a tenuous grasp of history at best, and are not served by being told about historical events in a clearly non-historical, unreal, dramatized, and fantasized manner. It is especially egregious when there is no historical version to point to (in English at least, there is Chushingura in Japanese) when discussing the subject. I read mostly science fiction, and I read both 300 and The Gates of Fire, and while I loved 300, I wish the latter had been made first. I have read many versions of 47 Ronin, and none of them had a dragon or any unrealistic fantasy. Any of them would have made a great action packed adult movie with many lessons to teach rather than just a fun few hours watching Neo save the Asians. To me, adding the fantasy is tantamount to saying the story isn't compelling enough without embellishment, and this one certainly is. To me, it's the same as exaggeration, it's like admitting reality isn't good (or bad) enough to make the point in your argument. Pure fantasy is exempt from this issue.
P.S. sorry for the essay.

How about the gratuitous (repeated & identical) sounds of ricochet foley during gunplay?....."Pew-Pew-Pewoiiiiiingggg!"

Here's a great run-down on the subject of swords and their practical applications in conflict or combat ➽➽➽➽➽➽

http://www.thehaca.com/essays/nobest.htm

Holy f* this guy needs to learn something about concision.

GET TO THE F*N POINT. And maybe you'd get to your questions before your subject has time to finish their essay and move on to something else.

I disagree, I think you garner hostility here because you do not add to the discussion, you merely spout your hyper religious nonsense ad nauseaum and flail and spin to make your arguments, while ignoring or twisting all input from others and even your own previous statements. That, and you have to write an essay or novel to answer each single line question.
At least those are my issues with you. There are plenty of other religious thinkers here that aren't being mass-ignored. That proves your 'they don't like christianity' stance is obvious BS, it's something else.
I grew up in a non-theistic household, and I'm just sick of the endless ridiculous fanatical ramblings. I haven't ignored you, I just don't read most of it. As soon as you start quoting the bible I stop reading, because I see that as a cop out that fanatics use when they can't make a rational argument, 'I know it's true because my fairy tale book tells me so" is not a rational argument, it is an indicator that the speaker is incapable of making one.

@ shinyblurry

This had already turned into an essay and I didn't want to take up even more room by quoting you verbatim so I've tried to break it down to save space.



1. "Except that?"

There are no absolute logical principles <---- including that one.
This is simply another way of describing the problem of induction and under determination. Like so many philosophical arguments you have attacked my position based upon the language it was described in and not due to its underlying thought process. This has resulted in a fallacy. Language merely conveys knowledge, it does not in an of itself contain it (and excellent example incidentally of what I was talking about).

2. "Is that absolutely true?"

All principles (save the observation "thinking exists") can only ever derived by induction. This is the case because one can never know for certain if any or all of ones experiences are fabrications, and furthermore that they never encompass all possible variables/possibilities. To put it another way, you can't ever be certain about any judgement one makes about the universe or anything in it because one cannot observe an exhaustive perspective (i.e. all of time and space for the thing in question). Thus there may always exist an example that could falsify your assumption. e.g. if I inducted that all swans are white because I had only ever seen white swans I would ultimately be incorrect as black swans can be observed to exist. Unless you can verify the entirety of existence across time there might always exist and experience/example to falsify any objective assertion. (you could be a brain in a jar, you can't prove 100% that your not)


3. "Including not permitting..which means you have no further argument against Christianity."

^ Pardon me? Did you even read what I wrote by way of explanation for that? What part of "everything is permitted" even remotely precludes me (or anyone) from anything, let alone arguing against Christianity?!?!?

What I felt I'd explained fairly clearly was the idea that the only demonstrable moral authority was yourself, or to put it another way that there are no moral authorities to be found anywhere else but within peoples minds.
Even if God himself speaks to you directly, that is an experience reducible only to the mind because ALL EXPERIENCES WITHIN HUMAN CONCEPTION OCCUR IN or at best VIA THE MIND!

Nothing has ever happened to any human being anywhere that was not experienced entirely in the mind (notice I didn't say "brain" ). When you see a chair you don't see the photons of light hitting your retina, you see something your mind made up to be representative (at best) of whatever phenomenon your eyes detected.

With that in mind (<- mind lol), "everything is permitted". The universe will continue on, unmoved by our moralities (or lack of). Only other humans will cry or rejoice at your actions and only within the sovereignty of your own mind will you find an irrefutable and absolute moral judge...

As for the other bits

A. "The earliest records of Mithraism bear no similarity to Christianity at all....."

Apart from all the same major dates for festivals and holy days (25th dec etc.), the entire symbology of dieing on a cross for three days then being resurrected, the "last supper" with 12 disciples, 3 wise men from the east bearing gifts. etc. etc.

I'd have more time for the Christian counter argument that the Mithraists stole this stuff from them if the same themes, dates and symoblogy didn't pop up in ancient cultures going back a few 1000 years over and over and over. The list of Messianic figures with the above characteristics in western folklore & myth is so long its almost a joke! & naturally is no co-incidence as they are describing the movement of the heavens (specifically the sun) by way of allegory. Speaking of which............

Pagan & Gnostic traditions are deeply intertwined to the point where one could consider many examples to be one and the same. Mithraism would be one such example. Pagan just means many Gods/worship of nature & archetypes in the human psyche. Mithraism fulfils this definition but it also fulfils the Gnostic one i.e. it teaches that one finds god of and within oneself, not as an external force, or indeed a force which is separate from oneself.

But then the Catholic Church did it level best to suppress and destroy any trace of Gnosticism through the ages so its no surprise to me that you're not entirely familiar with it. (most people haven't even heard of it and those that do tend to be under the misapprehension that its a Christian thing (again understandable under the circumstances))


B. "Actually, they came from a progressive revelation of Judiasm which preceeded all of that."

I'll come with you a little on that one. Before Rex Mundi (Jehova) showed up to fk everything up for them the Kabbalistic (and essentially Pagan) Jews possessed great wisdom and insight. Naturally not all of this was lost! (though after Solomon passed it would appear a regrettably large amount was)


C. "What Jesus did not teach that came from Judiasm was wholly His and entirely unique, and they came from the mouth of God Himself."


I'm not sure I even want to grace that with a response. How could you possibly know what came from the mouth of God to a man 2000 years ago? If you say "because it says in the bible" please don't expect a sensible reply (I'm happy to fight non-sense with none-sense)


D. "The difference is Jesus Himself. You could take buddha out of buddhism, or zoroaster out of zoroastrianism and you would still have something. Without Jesus there is no Christianity."

^This one amused be greatly. I would say Buddhism & Zoroastranism were clearly superior for exactly that reason but that's not what I think you were alluding to? I assume you were suggesting that certain parts of the whole Jesus shebang could only have come from Jesus/God/Holy spirit because he made himself the centre of attention?
This is why I make a very distinct separation between the "Jesus" and the "Christ". Christ (or anointed one) goes back at least to Egypt. Horus is clearly "Christ" by basically any sensible measure I can think of, and by "Christ" I mean the "Sun of God" i.e. the freaking Sun.
This also forms the basis for an "as above so below" parable/allegory for the spiritual journey to enlightenment. You can find your way to heaven and God via the "Sun of God's" wisdom. No Miracle performing hippie Jew's were required before and I fail to see how sprouting the same fundamental idea just with a figurehead for a disenfranchised Jewish noble family anchored to everything helps?

Are there some pearl's of Jesus's wisdom I missed? Thus far I have yet to come across anything that didn't strike me as either a rewording of things wise men had preached for 1000's of years previously, or a power play by an unscrupulous or deluded individual.


E. "The Jesus myth theory isn't taken seriously by even skeptical bible scholars. There is more evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ than for Alexander the Great."

I happen to know its hotly contested even to this day but lets for the sake of this just take it as a given. When I said "at best a fabrication" it was because I consider the historical figure to be an impostor and a fraud. If anyone was a "true" messiah then John the Baptist and moreover Simon Magus are far better contenders but then that's a colossal can of worms I'm not sure I can be bothered to open at the moment. I'll just say in summary that I am of the opinion that Mr. Ben Yosef and his crew were plotting to return the house of David to power but largely failed in the end as the Roman establishment usurped most of the legacy they tried to create (though not entirely).
Either way they worshiped and championed a being (Psychological archetype) which I feel I have little choice but to call Satan i.e. the God of Abraham. This alone is a pretty major indictment for me and any historic figure that puts said "being" at the center of their belief system will garner my suspicion.

How can the God that appeared to Abraham be anything but malevolent if the accounts in the Torah and Quran are accurate?

(I hope that made sense towards the end, getting very late & tired here...)

This may run long, so bear with me.

Law Enforcement employees tend to come from two specific groups of people. The first group is going to consist of people who actually joined up to try to protect people and make things safer for them. They are idealists who may grow jaded over time; because realistically if your only input on what being a LEO is the internet and reality TV, you are not prepared for the type of mental assault you will endure day in and day out. I'm not talking about angry people, but stuff like drawing circles around little chunks of brains on the highway from a teenage girl that went through a windshield.

As an officer at any level (except maybe a small town), you are going to see the absolute worst side of humanity on a daily basis and you aren't on a tour of duty like the military. You don't get to 'rotate' home and put it behind you. This will wear on anybody who is not a sociopath, it will grind you down to a nub. You could see professional help for this, but I will go into that later.

The second type of person who goes into law enforcement is someone who likes authority, a sense of power over someone else, a bully. This person is in the job because it gives them power over others and the law will protect them because it is vaguely worded in SO many cases. This person will shrug off the effects that cripple the first type over time, because they feel in charge of every situation. After a while, if they don't tone it down, they will get caught. Thankfully the cell camera and the internet tends to be helping clean them out due to their own incapability to see they can't ALWAYS be in charge, but it will be a long road because this group is the BULK of the ones that join LE organizations.

Now why do these two groups tend to be the ones that you are going to run into on a consistent basis? The simple, hard answer is that we pay our front line LEO's very little compared to other services that risk their life or experience the mental grind. Your average patrol officer is going to pull a median salary of about 35k with comparable benefits to someone working in a office job. A firefighter is going to pull around 45k and scales up much quicker, not to mention their benefits are beyond good. EMT's make about the same as patrol officers, but their benefits are also very good and they don't have the same stressors. I know that ranges will vary and State LEO's are very well paid on average, but we are talking about the people you are going to encounter most often.

If you have to choose between a job where you are going to be considered a 'hero' or a job where everyone is going to be biased towards you being a 'villain, and the hero jobs pay better, which would you logically choose? Assuming of course that you are not sorted into one of the two groups I described, most are going to run away from serving in LE. In fact, this is why more of the 'bullies' tend towards LE and the 'idealists' don't. So you already have created a situation where the 'stormtrooper' mindset is going to prefer this job and haven't considered options to rectify it. The people you don't run into that much are going to be the people that took college and got pushed through the ranks quickly. If you didn't take college or just took an Associates Degree, you have to beat these people out. It is extremely hard to do that, even if you do your job much better than they did.

The final factor that runs into this is the mental issues I mentioned earlier. If you seek help from your employers for mental stress, they are going to handle it differently if you are a LEO. You are going to find out quickly that you are expendable. If you seek help and get classified as PTSD, you set a chain of events in motion that is inexorable. You will be rotated to a desk. You will see a Psychiatrist who will prescribe anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. This person will meet with you for around 15 minutes 3-4 times a week, ask you questions, and ask if the medication is helping. If you return to functional status in a month or two, you get put back on duty. If you don't, they put you on short term disability for up to one year. Your visits drop to once a week, then once a month. One year later, your employment is terminated. They hire a new recruit and start the cycle again about the same time that you start your short term disability. You get to try to salvage your career in anyway possible, hopefully you paid through the nose for long term disability, or you can try to find a smaller department that doesn't bother to dig too deep on background checks.

Other related fields like firefighters/emts comprehend PTSD and work with their people much harder. They have better benefits so you they can see outside therapists as much as needed. There is less stigma if you have a problem, because they understand. You go on the fritz as an LEO and you will overhear people who used to respect you call you weak or a pussy. Sadly this type of thing happens at all levels of LE, even as a State Trooper you are expendable.

In any case, the point to this essay is that the system is flawed and is going to drive out the good LEOs and save the bad ones to protect itself from litigation. Protect yourself at all times with video, be advised of the laws and loopholes in them that bad LEos will exploit, and don't force confrontation with a LEO if there is a loophole. If the man had stepped outside and talked calmly, the incident would not have escalated as it did. In this case he did not inform himself of the loopholes correctly and got tasered (which was improper, they didn't warn him correctly or anything), and the LEOs look like villains again.

^ You can make all of that make sense by simply shifting your epistemological position to the only ones which truly make sense i.e. phenomenology &/or perspectivism.

To rephrase that in less impenetrable terms:
"Materialism" (or in your case I assume "Scientific Materialism") that is to say 'matter is primary', from a philosophers POV is a deeply flawed assumption. Flawed because there appears to be not one experience in human history that did not occur entirely within the mind.
When one see's say a Dog, one only ever experiences the images and sensations occurring within ones mind. You don't see the photons hitting your retina, only the way your mind as interpreted the data.

However the opposite position "Idealism" (mind is primary) is also fundamentally flawed in the exact opposite way. If our minds are the only "real" things then where exactly are they? And how do we even derive logic and reason if there is not something outside of ourselves which it describes? etc. etc.

Philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre' got around this by defining a new category, "phenomena". We know for certain that "phenomena" exist in some sense because we experience them, the categories of mind and matter then become secondary properties, both only existing as definitions we apply retrospectively to experiences. i.e. stuff happens and then our brains kick in and say "that happened because of X because in the past X has preceded similar experiences" or "that thing looks like other examples of Y so is probably Y".

The problem then is that this appears to come no closer to telling us what is objectively happening in the universe, it's more like linguistic/logical housekeeping. The phenomenologists and existentialists did a superb job of clearing away all of the old invalid baggage about how we try to describe things, but they did little or nothing to solve the problem of Kants "nouminal world" (i.e. the "real" stuff that we are experiencing by simulation in our minds).

Its stumped philosophers for centuries as we don't appear to have any way to ever get at this "nouminal" or "real" world we naturally assume must exist in some way. But....

I reckon ultimately one of the first western philosophers in history nailed the way out 3000 or so years ago. Pythagoras said "all is number" and due to the work of Euler, Riemann and Fourier in particular I think we can now make it stick. (yeh its turning into an essay sorry )

Without wishing to go deep into a subject you could spend half your life on; Fourier transforms are involved in signal processing. It is a mathematical means by which spatio-temporal signals (e.g. the vibration of a string or the movement of a record needle) can be converted with no meaningful loss of information into frequency (analog) or binary (digital) forms and back again.

Mathematically speaking there is no reason to regard the "signal" as any less "real" whether it is in frequency form or spatio-temporal form. It is the same "signal", it can be converted 100% either direction.

So then here's the biggie: Is there any reason why we could not regard instrumental mathematical numbers and operations (i.e. the stuff we write down and practice as "mathematics") and the phenomena in the universe they appear to describe. I.e. when we use man made mathematical equations to describe and model the behavior of "phenomena" we experience like say Physicists do, could we suggest that we are using a form of Fourier transform? And moreover that this indicates an Ontological (existing objectively outside of yourself) aspect to the mathematical "signals".

Or to put it another way, is mathematics itself really real?

The Reimann sphere and Eulers formula provide a mathematical basis to describe the entirety of known existence in purely mathematical terms, but they indicate that pure ontological mathematics itself is more primary than anything we ever experience. It suggests infact that we ourselves are ultimately reducible to Ontological mathematical phenomena (what Leibniz called "Monads").

What we think of as "reality" could then perhaps be regarded as non dimensional (enfolded) mathematics interacting in such a way as to create the experience of a dimensional (unfolded) universe of extension (such as ours).

(R = distance between two points)
Enfolded universe: R=0
Unfolded universe: R>0

Neither is more "real", they are simply different perspectives from which Ontological mathematics can observe itself.

"Reality": R>=0

I've explained parts of that poorly sorry. Its an immense subject and can be tackedled from many different (often completely incompatible) paradigms. I hope at the very lest I have perhaps demonstrated that the Holographic universe theory could have legs if we combine the advances of scientific exploration (i.e. study of matter) with those of Philosophy and neuroscience (i.e. study of mind & reason itself). The latest big theory doing the rounds with neuroscience is that the mind/consciousness is a fractal phenomenon, which plays into what I've been discussing here more than you might think.

Then again maybe you just wrote me off as a crackpot within the first few lines "lawl" etc..

very cool sift. Here's a little essay suggesting certain problems with Rand's philosophy
https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatwritings/errors-of-ayn-rand

its a little heavy handed, but a good counterweight to this piece. I think Ayn Rand is a great example of how brilliant philosophy does not translate into good politics - allow our philosophy to direct our science and our science to direct our lives, one tempered by the other, that's how to progress as a species. The sanctification of ideas is a dirty game, one i think Rand is guilty of playing a bit too much of.
</rant>

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

You are an a-godzilla-ist and that is entirely a practical concession to the fact that you can't really afford giant monster insurance considering recent statistics for giant lizard attacks and indeed going through life avoiding Tokyo at all costs is just kinda a bummer - imagine all the fresh sushi you could miss out on.

You can't actually prove that there never was a Godzilla or that there never will be a Godzilla and you can only assume (not demonstrate) that there is not a Godzilla planet orbiting one of the stars a few galaxies down the way.

All you can really say is that Tokyo is still standing and that all the various accounts of Godzilla's antics across the myriad of B-movies and hollywood blockbusters that feature him as a character seem to have no basis in reality for various reasons. You move on with your day, smile a bit and never really bother to duck for cover.

And that's all we're saying about God. To my knowledge, that is the bleeding edge of audacious claims being made by anyone who is even vaguely respected - simply that we can't take religious claims seriously any more, so we are going to move on with our lives, only dealing with religion directly when it decides to be a bit too influential for our tastes.

But fine, based on the secondary predicate principle and a lengthy philosophy 101 essay with no shortage of verbal meandering through Descartes, et al., atheists kinda sorta make a claim of some sort. What's your point.

And if you think that the atheist experience simply trawls the bottom of Christian intellectualism then who would you have them debate, Ray comfort? Matt Slick? Perhaps you?

More than anything, the most disgusting trait of Christianity is that it equates child rapists and children as equally sinful in the eyes of God. There are certainly various arguments saying that different consequences will be felt here on earth, or perhaps that there is an arbitrary age of innocence, etc... But almost universally, Christians agree that the following scenario is at least possible:

Rapist rapes child, we'll start with that.

The child struggles through the resultant torturous anguish across a lifetime, starts a support group, mans a hotline, works in the community to support fellow victims, increases awareness and so on while loving his/her family and friends, making mistakes periodically and occasionally letting loose at a concert or something. The child (now an adult) is unfortunately just a minimally observant Jew and never really gave Jesus any consideration, so when he/she gets hit by a drunk driver at the unfortunate age of 34, he/she is tormented in hell for the rest of eternity.

The rapist, meanwhile, goes on with his (statistically probable) life, perhaps he rapes some more children (also statistically probable) and maybe he then stops at some point, realizing it is wrong and maybe even feels guilty about it. Ridden by guilt, the preaching of a wayward street preacher catch his ears one day. He ventures into church for the first time. He is moved. He proclaims his belief in Jesus and the resurrection. He feels his sins are forgiven and he can feel years of guilt being washed away. Maybe he even admits his history as a rapist to a sympathetic inner circle of confidants, spiritual advisors and friends. He dies of a heart attack, and spends eternity in heaven.

That is disgusting and a god that sets such a system up is disgusting.

Many compassionate people are blinded into thinking this is just and good in an effort to tenaciously preserve their own sense of eternal safety and cosmic worth at all costs. That is less disgusting just because it is an understandable impulse, but it is disgusting nonetheless.

That's the weirdest video I've ever seen... I mean since when does Prince care that much about essay writing?

>> ^Sagemind:

In the political jargon and propaganda of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Communist International, western democratic states were referred to as "plutocracies", with the implication being that a small number of extremely wealthy individuals were controlling the countries and holding them in ransom. "Plutocracy" replaced "democracy" and "capitalism" as the principal fascist term for the United States and Great Britain during the Second World War. For the Nazis, the term was often a code word for "the Jews".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy


Are you seriously suggesting that someone who thinks this video demonstrates plutocratic tendencies are themselves antisemitic, totalitarian and/or fascist?

Thank you!
In reply to this comment by enoch:
*promote

Your video, Bill Moyers Essay: When Bosses Push Their Politics, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

No sweat bro..take your time. I always appreciate the substantive discourse that you bring to the table. I also appreciate that life is often pulling us in many different directions and so setting aside a slice of time to do justice to topics like these can be problematic. I'm often in the same bind which is why it took me a week or so to reply to your original post.

>> ^messenger:

@shinyblurry
I've started answering you, and it's turning into another meaty essay, which may come in the next few days. I can summarize it that I 98% accept the first two paragraphs of your description of the implications of accepting meaninglessness as fact, almost as words from my own mouth.
I didn't explain what I meant by "bliss" well enough earlier, and that's what I'm hacking away at now.
I also realize I owe you a few replies from comment threads gone by a couple months ago when my life was busy. Haven't forgotten.