It was my understanding that all Europeans are born with the inherent ability to flawlessly navigate roundabouts. This upsets the natural order of things.

Also, I was promised a jetpack.

You've just skirted over my point completely. Without regulation, what is to stop powerful people from subjugating the little guy?

I get the feeling that you think current labor standards are part of some kind of natural order. Child labor laws, 40 hour work weeks, weekends, workplace safety standards, workplace compensation, wage standards and overtime were hard fought political battles that we now take for granted. Deregulate and there is no motivation for big business to honor any of these principles.

Danny, sorry to burn your logic cubes in my nonsense sun. Logic cubes are much less vulnerable to melting when you keep them hidden away in the dark. Good call.

There exists a rift between the citizens and government, there has always been a rift. The citizen is one person, the government is a group of citizens, and a set of laws used to maintain the status quo.

There will always be a rift between the people, and an amorphous conglomeration of people that is made into an authority. Like Home Owners Associations, like Parent Teacher Associations, like the KKK, like the Baader Miehnhof, like corporations, police departments, Al Qeada, Taliban, Republican, Democrat. I would equate it to Tribalism. Simply put survival of the fittest, and the fittest are always part of a tribe. Unless they are already at the top of the food chain. Some tribes are much more insidious than others.

It has always been with Humans, one group vying for power over the other group. So it shall be for the rest of the Species existence, it is the natural order of things.

Before you ask, I'm not Human. I'm a Philosocat, much like a Philosoraptor.

"My excuse: River has been hanging out with deer for a long time... this was a first, because of the newborn, and it went haywire in a hurry."

Tut tut. Afraid that's no excuse. Your dog shouldn't be making friends with the local fauna in the first place and you shouldn't have been encouraging it! If it had a healthy fear of large wild animals (and if the large wild animals also had a healthy fear of you) then it wouldn't have been curbstomped by a pissed off mother deer in the first place.

We can enjoy the serenity of nature best when we DO NOT INTERFERE with it. The deer and it's instinctual reaction to the parody of an apex predator that is your dog, is ultimately rooted in human interference with the natural order of things.

>> ^KnivesOut:
Time to take me to bed! Ohh yeah choogie, YEAH!!>> ^choggie:
blah blah blah



-It's only blah blah blah when sage wisdom falls on developmentally disabled ears-Putting words in mouths is the media's game, on either side of the same fence, knifeboy. People buy bullshit when they watch too much television....Why do you think there's nothing that does not read, "Made in China, Mexico, etc." on anything you own??

Why does the only source(s) used here either come form those tainted by the system (TYT, others) and the major media?? Distraction. Diversion.Mindless banter designed to inhibit the natural order and processes...To keep you thinking you have a clue or worthwhile observation until the ceiling caves in on you and yours, at which point, you will be completely fucked.

Thank you for the kudos, ....at your service.

Oh and Meds?? Those are for hypochondriacs, and people who don't want to see every pharmaceutical company in flames tomorrow. I have no mental disorders, my strengths and faults are by design. Pills are for fucking losers-Do like the codeine though!!

Hey relax, have patience, nothing wrong with being a second class citizen, its just the natural order of things. Think back over the last two thousand years. Christians were second class citizens for a while and look what happened to them! Sure they had to go through the whole "feed them to the lions" era, but they got over that and reigned supreme. The same will happen to the atheism movement, I just hope the lions part is a metaphor for something else, I'm allergic to cats, especially the big ones with pointy teeth and sharp claws...

Sorry it took so long to respond, I had a busy weekend.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

I'm going to need a definition of "decide" I suppose. It seems like you are dancing around these squishy intuitive concepts instead of having a specific physical distinction to point out. The amoeboid is composed of a lipid bilayer membrane riddled with intricate protein micro-machines that detect changes in the environment, and behaviorally compensate. To discount the intricacy of the mechanisms of genetic expression and chemical signaling that exist even in the simplest of eukaryotic organism is foolish IMHO. Many of the modern models of genetic expression, and compensation for environmental factors look strikingly similar to the connectionist network models of the brain. The computations are similar in the abstract.


You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Well, more likely I'm moldopomorphizing us. What goals do we have that are ultimately distinct from survival, reproduction, and the general continuity of our species? Even something as seemingly unrelated as making music, or art could be cast as some sort of mating ritual. When you somehow separate our behavior from the rest of life on Earth it's as though you want to draw a barrier between us and them. You want to somehow separate us from the natural order. I hate to break it to you, but it just isn't so. We are just demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of the second law of thermodynamics.


Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

I experience the moment. In fact, that's all I'm ever experiencing, although my sensation of it may run a little behind. I never experience my memory, I merely compare my experience to memory. Further, what I'm suggesting is not entirely distinct from any experience we claim to have. Some autistic individuals, for instance, report an extremely chaotic existence, in which causal models can't be formed as sensory modalities are not unified in the same way as ours. They are experienced as independent inputs, not reflective of a coherent physical world. Still, they experience it.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

Things can not be enforced without an enforcer. Further, as you've conceded the determinism of our brains, again, how are we not passively allowing the laws of nature to push us around? What exactly are we deciding?


I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

No, I believe that by some other physical mechanism, likely involving quarks and particle physics that I admittedly have a poor understanding of, the electron receives information from not immediately proximal locations, and physically displaces itself to a location with more desirable properties given its current energy state. I don't see how that's different than cuddling up to a warm fire.


You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

Something like that , although I still don't like the word decide. I don't necessarily think they do come to a consensus. It's just that, as with an attractor network, or similar guaranteed convergence dynamical systems, certain macroscopic states are just more likely than others, despite chaos at the subordinate level. The reason I'd rather drop the word decide is because I don't necessarily want to open the door to something like free will. To cast it in a "God" metaphor, I imagine more of an omniscient God, than an omnipotent God.


Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

I can't other than to refer you to what I presume you to have. I could suggest focussing on your breathing, or what have you. I can point you towards literature showing that people that claim to focus on their consciousness can perform physical feats not previous considered possible (for instance monks rewriting the books on the physical tolerance of the human body to cold). Otherwise, I can't. I will say this, however, I take it to be the atomic element of inductive reason. The natural "laws" you are taking as primary are secondary. There is a simple reason for this as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out. If suddenly we were to observe all bits of matter floating away from one another, and were to confirm we were not hallucinating, and perhaps have the experience corroborated by our colleagues, it would not be the experience which was wrong, it would be the laws of nature. Experience has primacy. Matter is merely the logical consequence of applying induction to our particular set of shared experiences.


And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

I told you, in the best english I can, what X is. It's the qualia of phenomenal experience. Now I can't provide you with direct evidence for it, but I can tell you that nearly everyone I talk to has some sense of what I mean.


You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

I take the Bayesian sense of the word. All probabilities are subjective degrees of belief. I adopt this degree of belief based on anecdotal experience and generalizations therein. None of this would be accepted as evidence by any reviewer, nor should it, and thus I wouldn't want to risk my credibility by asserting it as fact. I can believe some hypotheses to be more likely than others on the basis of no evidence, and in fact do all the time. That's how I, and all other scientists, decide what experiment to run next. I should not, however, expect you to believe me a priori, as you may operate on different axioms, and draw from different anecdotal experience. Thus, I would not feel compelled to assert my beliefs as fact, other than in so far as they are, in fact, my beliefs.

Westy and gwiz665, you both make a good point. What you're speaking of could be called "emotional economy". It's the idea that we only place emotional investment in those close to us - those whom we expect will in return invest emotionally in us. This is the natural way of human civilization, and it is an important psychological defense mechanism. For instance, as i write this, someone somewhere in the world just died. If all people could feel the death of all other people (or creatures in general), we would all be overwhelmed by the constant flood of pain and emotion.

However, you fail to understand the nature of the situation. And while it is important to have a rational outlook on the subject of celebrities, it is also important to understand this next concept:

When you kill an animal for food (or buy a packaged, pre-killed, animal product) it is healthy to thank that animal for giving its life to sustain your own. Too many people thank God, or some other thing, but thanking the animal - so that you understand your own place in the natural order - is the true purpose of saying grace before eating.

Without that thanks, and without the understanding that comes with genuine gratitude for the sacrifice of another life for your own, a person begins to devalue the life of the creature they killed. The devaluation continues and grows in its own way, until eventually that person (and all people) come to believe themselves to be above less intelligent forms of life. Understand: Just because humans are higher on the food chain doesn't mean you are any more significant than a deer - or a bee. Or even a virus.

It is not possible to understand the meaning of this overnight. It is a kind of insight that must grow in you until the meaning becomes clear on its own. It is the same as when your parents push you to say "please" and "thank you" and to show respect in general and have good manners. As a very young child, you don't understand the necessity. But as you grow older and gain experience with other people and social situations, you begin to understand that the words "please", "thank you", "excuse me", "i'm sorry", and so on, have a deeper purpose that goes beyond mere manners.

And so it is with emotional expression. People form attachments to artists and performers. These attachments are, in truth, almost always made to the image that the artist is projecting of him- or herself. But even that projected image is a part of the person. Just as importantly however, it should be understood that celebrities /become/ celebrities not just because of the link between their image and their fans, but also because of the links between people who share a love or interest in what that famous person is doing. People tend to congregate around ideas (and ideals). That's why going to church is so popular. People could worship in the privacy of their own homes, yet many choose to go to a church (or temple, etc). Why? Because of the social aspect. Because of the shared links, not just between the congregation and the topic at hand, but also between all the people present! It is this way with all things.

Understand further that a person's emotional investment itself is so often times tied directly to some event in their life. Perhaps someone experienced her first kiss while Elvis was playing on the radio in the background. Perhaps a close family member died 20 or 30 years ago, and at that time, that person heard a song that echoed the same feelings he or she was feeling at that moment. There was a sense that "Yes, someone else out there /knows/ what i'm going through. Their lyrics comfort me. Their melody is a catharsis of my very soul." There's a gratitude there. And now that the musician has died, it is as if the person has lost a piece of themselves.

It may not seem rational, but it is most certainly logical.

Understand finally that this emotional connection to a person's outward persona is a fine and necessary substitution for having a direct emotional connection to them. (Regardless of whether they're a so-called "celebrity" or not.) The problem isn't that we have too much of that, it's that we don't have enough of it going around to more people. And what we do have is too often abused by unscrupulous journalism (ie: "The Media"). Perhaps you would find it interesting to know that i personally have more emotional resonance with Tori Amos than i do with any one of my blood kin. She and i don't know each other personally, but her actions (her music) have helped me through situations that none of them would or could have (and in fact, some of those situations were caused by them).

There's so much more that could be said on this subject, though i will simply close with this: All things in moderation. Balance.

Looks like somebody needed a friendly reminder about the natural order of things.

I just don't see how the idea of giving people a fair share of the pie is some kind of Orwellian dystopia.

I don't see how it's okay for a handful of people to have more wealth and economic control than hundreds of millions of other people combined.

I think it's cowardice to pretend that this is the natural order of things.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^imstellar28:

That is of course, the classic counter argument to what I (and everyone on the Hill) is proposing.
My view is that the picture you draw is too static. If the market is always better at providing prosperity, why are people losing jobs and having to spend less?
It's not crushing taxes levied to pay off the debt -- we've never really had anyone try to do that.
It's not crushing regulation stopping people from starting businesses, it's the bankers themselves cutting off investment capital because they're afraid they've already gambled and lost every penny they own.
Maybe it's because when the market is left to its own devices, it pushes empty ponzi schemes as the main engine of the economy, instead of the old-fashioned idea of actually producing goods and services that require work.
I'm not saying that incurring the debt is a good idea, I'm just saying that if we slash government "spending" to a level below our falling revenues, you'll only make the situation worse, and make revenues drop even further as the economy grinds to a halt.
I think we both agree that this whole thing will sort itself out, in the same way that we'd agree that life, in some form, would survive a nuclear war, the difference is, I want to fight the nuclear proliferation because I don't really want my survival skills tested that much, while you say "nukes for everybody!" because you have faith that the natural order of things will work out to the best possible result.
As for the thought that this is the result of 90 years of government meddling, I don't think there's evidence for that at all. Again, the issue isn't with our national debt or regulation, it's with what the private sector did when government "got out of the way".


I was being somewhat facetious in my earlier post, Imstellar's post is much closer to my line of thinking. I disagree with the Krugman/Summers/Geithner/Obama plan which is what you are advocating. My problem is I don't trust them. You seem to be hoping for a Cinncinnatus when history shows you always get a Caesar to some extent. I think things will get very bad no matter what we do. The Obama Administration's hope is to get the "economy going again." Obama's plan is skipping an important part of the process though. Savings and production need to be built back up again which will mean huge asset declines in the mean time. If this process is skipped (it will be largely) then we will have massive inflation. These bad investments need to be liquidated not propped up or we'll be stuck in this rut a lot longer than we would be otherwise. There will always be a buyer at the right price. The problem is that the banks are insolvent and instead of selling their deposits to smaller less politically connected and better capitalized banks they are threatening to take the whole system down. The government should let them fail but they won't because then JPM and GS won't be around to naked short gold to keep the dollar looking good for Obama's big spending plans. Well, I don't know how long they can keep that going we're 2 weeks in Obama's presidency and gold is skyrocketing. You want to know where that TARP money went? Covering short positions in gold.

>> ^imstellar28:


That is of course, the classic counter argument to what I (and everyone on the Hill) is proposing.

My view is that the picture you draw is too static. If the market is always better at providing prosperity, why are people losing jobs and having to spend less?

It's not crushing taxes levied to pay off the debt -- we've never really had anyone try to do that.

It's not crushing regulation stopping people from starting businesses, it's the bankers themselves cutting off investment capital because they're afraid they've already gambled and lost every penny they own.

Maybe it's because when the market is left to its own devices, it pushes empty ponzi schemes as the main engine of the economy, instead of the old-fashioned idea of actually producing goods and services that require work.

I'm not saying that incurring the debt is a good idea, I'm just saying that if we slash government "spending" to a level below our falling revenues, you'll only make the situation worse, and make revenues drop even further as the economy grinds to a halt.

I think we both agree that this whole thing will sort itself out, in the same way that we'd agree that life, in some form, would survive a nuclear war, the difference is, I want to fight the nuclear proliferation because I don't really want my survival skills tested that much, while you say "nukes for everybody!" because you have faith that the natural order of things will work out to the best possible result.

As for the thought that this is the result of 90 years of government meddling, I don't think there's evidence for that at all. Again, the issue isn't with our national debt or regulation, it's with what the private sector did when government "got out of the way".

No, not pollution, not a natural occurrence , Could this be HAARP focused upon a specific area of the globe??.....Could the epicenter, about 500km away from where these lights appeared, prior to the Sichuan Earthquake, have been the location of China's main centers for designing, making and storing nuclear arms ????...Think so, perhaps.
Red and green light emitted from oxygen atoms is a constituent of the light seen at the poles. Atmospheric nitrogen also plays a role. Solar winds are the prevailing catalyst for brilliant auroral displays....
Was this an artificial geomagnetic occurrence, a blast of solar wind, or some benign, regular phenom in this area of the globe??? Kind of.Maybe.Perhaps.
Is HAARP or the patents associated with the dynamics of the apparatus involved capable of producing a variety of effects, which Nikola Tesla described as being wholly possible back in the 30s-40s? Did the military and the elite financiers shut Tesla down, when he would not stop talking about free energy and a new era of prosperity and evolution for humankind? Has the Dept. of the Navy, the air force, Raytheon done anything in recent years, to facilitate peace and prosperity for all, or for but a few, of their friends, family, cronies and sympathetic assholes??? Is China in the way of the European stranglehold over world economies that they have held for centuries??
Do you speak Chinese??? Better fucking learn, because these folks are pissed, and there's more of em than anybody....

Next stop, WW3, the natural order of things in a world where kings still play chess, the masses have their heads planted firmly in their own bullshit too smart, lazy, or fucking stupid to see they are the pawns, and where chaos, in all her glory, still reigns supreme, regardless of assholes and imbeciles....

Different generation, really. I guess he wasn't being particularly rude, he just thought that the natural order (as it was, in england, for a long time) was for a woman to be taking care in a family sense, and the man to the be provider.

Ok, he was wrong.. but he wasn't rude in particular. You can tell by the way he put it that he wasn't trying to be vindictive.

And that is the most amazing handling of a situation i've ever seen.

As of 2008, the following states have a majority population of atheists and are just as free as the USA and much more peaceful than the USA:

Norway
Sweden
Japan
France
Germany

I don't see the implied relationship of atheism to prosperity or peace. Freedom is not free. Many of the countries listed here are "more peaceful" because the USA spends its resources protecting them now, as well as defeating the ones that were rogue states (then rebuilding them) then.

I could be wrong, but none of the governments on the list has claimed that atheism is "official policy" and they are superior to the Source of natural order. At least three countries on the list are doomed to become Muslim.

However during WWII, the overwhelming majority of Japanese and Germans were adherents to various religions.

Obviously they didn't practice the values that religions instill and organized atheism mimics, beginning with the belief that human life is sacred.

My point is not to denigrate atheists or individual atheism, a "movement" which only recently has established itself in the public eye. My point is to remind everyone here that the historical constant, due to flawed human nature, is that someone or something always has to be #1.

Be it monarch, God(s) or the ever-elusive State, One must dominate and claim itself as the Source of law and order. More tyrannical governments try to make the Leader(s) divinely equal or greater than God. These always seem to end in massive bloodshed.

Downvote is for the distortion of the meaning behind Stein's words by the narrator, not for his arguments against.