That milk example assumes infinite ability to gather information about the product you're consuming. I don't have time to check that the milk that I buy in the supermarket is pasteurised. I'm quite happy that some of the tax I pay checks that for me. That raw milk whose source is immediately verifiable isn't saleable isn't an argument for deregulation, it's highlighting a case of poorly written legislation.

Apologies if the view I'm assigning to Mr. Paul isn't correct.

>> ^blankfist:

>> ^NetRunner:
Hitler isn't infamous because he built the Autobahn. Making an omelet generally doesn't involve crimes against humanity. Nor does building roads.
You're wrong. His omelet was the greater good of Germany. He broke a number of eggs that involved crimes against humanity, segregation and imperialism.
He was building the utopian society. Through force and coercion.
That aside, the civil rights act is poorly written and a huge encroachment on our rights. It stands in the way of equality because it tips the playing field unfairly and tries to legislate the hearts and minds of men and women. Terrible central planning morass.


But here's the thing, you're aiming for a utopian society too, and though you won't admit it, you're proposing to use force and coercion to get there.

The difference is, I care about the actual outcomes for people in our society. For you, the only thing that matters is that force is always used to uphold your vision of morality. Property owners get absolute authority, and people who challenge that authority should get violently coerced to stop. If it turns out that setting things up that way makes life qualitatively worse for wide swaths of people, you say so be it. You have to break a few eggs to make a liberty omelet.

I say that the goal here is to maximize human happiness. If you could convince me that something I believe in (like the Civil Rights Act) has created more suffering than it alleviates, I'd change my mind.

I think you've got a pretty hard case to make on the Civil Rights Act though. You'd literally have a better chance of convincing me that making an omelet is wrong; to make an omelet you have to kill the unborn children of a living creature! By the same token, you've got a pretty easy case when it comes to the things that made people like Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, Pol Pot, etc. infamous.

>> ^NetRunner:

Hitler isn't infamous because he built the Autobahn. Making an omelet generally doesn't involve crimes against humanity. Nor does building roads.

You're wrong. His omelet was the greater good of Germany. He broke a number of eggs that involved crimes against humanity, segregation and imperialism.

He was building the utopian society. Through force and coercion.

That aside, the civil rights act is poorly written and a huge encroachment on our rights. It stands in the way of equality because it tips the playing field unfairly and tries to legislate the hearts and minds of men and women. Terrible central planning morass.

>> ^blankfist:

So, we're now equating the conditional support of a poorly written and overreaching law to racism now? Interesting.
Equality is good. Racism is bad. We get it. You can't change the hearts and minds of people through legislation. You can only achieve that through discourse and being persuasive.


See? Denial of good done by legislation.

If you really want to wade into this conversation again, why not pick up where we left off last time?

So, we're now equating the conditional support of a poorly written and overreaching law to racism now? Interesting.

Equality is good. Racism is bad. We get it. You can't change the hearts and minds of people through legislation. You can only achieve that through discourse and being persuasive.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Well, there is argument in theological cicles that has been going about this for centuries about determinalism and how much is actually predestined. For myself, I was an agnostic until I was suddenly given special revelation of Gods existence. I had neither sought it nor even really suspected that God was really real. I found out later that this means I am elected, in that God already knew before He made anything that He would create me here and now for His purposes. So this means my life is predestined.
Some Christians think everyone is elected. I don't, personally. I think He elects some to do specific things for Him, as part of His plan. Now, if this was all predetermined it would really make it all an exercise in futility. There would no point to running the scenerio..why not just get to the results? Why waste time? There are three reasons I think that show we actually do have real choices.
One is just the fact that God offers us choices. If we didn't have the freewill to make them, they wouldn't be choices. Two is that when we are saved God doesn't remember our sins any longer. So to me this means that God doesn't necessarily have to call to mind everything He knows. Perhaps He restrains His foreknowledge so He can create scenerios with real choices. Three is that He does change His mind. For example, He changed His mind about letting Moses enter the promised land. Which means that what we do can change the outcome of what God does. Perhaps creation is a cooperative thing. I couldn't explain it with certainy but these are just some thoughts.

>> ^Ti_Moth:
>> ^shinyblurry:
It was not their lack of knowledge that made them "inferior", it was their faith in God that made them superior. Yet, God gave them the choice didn't He? Your argument here is null and void. He enjoyed a perfect relationship with them but He gave them the choice of knowing anyway. He warned them if they did it they would die. They chose not to trust God and lusted after his power, and then they reaped the consequences, which was seperation from God. It's the same story going on on Earth, right now, in every heart that has turned away from God. What He did, and is still doing, is fair and just. He doesn't coerce your love, but he will let you reap the consequences of the evil that you do, and He even gives you fair warning.

You seem to forget that apparantly your God is all knowing. He knew exactly what Adam and Eve would do, he knew what the serpant would do and he knew what he would do to them and the whole of humanity afterward (Torture a majority of them for eternity). Now maybe as an imperfect mortal I can't understand this strange "love" of his but it seems to me like your god is anything but all loving.



1.Whether we have free will or not is irrelivant your god is all knowing according to christian doctrine what sort of revelation did it take for you to worship this sadistic diety who TORTURES most of an entire species for THE REST OF TIME.
2.How can a being who can see the future (including his own actions) change his mind this seems to me like a massive plot hole in your poorly written holy book.

Dupes are painful when you like the video. It takes a lot of time (relatively speaking) to submit a video in a decent manner only to find it gone ten minutes later. Replaced by the original poorly written up video, with no thumbnail, no tags, and a misleading headline. All the same, I think it's a good idea to give the older video a promote of some kind.

It's not too far off from a poorly-written Doctor Who episode!

That is, a non-Stephen Moffett episode, of course!

* foams from mouth and collapses on the ground twitching and suffering a seizure from the poorly written song he just heard*

I don't always agree with Penn but he is bang on here. I have always been an atheist, even as a child I felt no connection to religion. Any involvement that I ever had with religion felt uncomfortable and plain wrong. No one could ever answer my critical thinking questions sufficiently enough to make me even consider it. When I got older I read through as much of the bible as I could manage and found none of the salvation or enlightening that was promised. All I found was a poorly written collection of stories loaded with mixed messages and undertones that I personally felt to be morally questionable.

For me I need no manuscript to tell me to respect my neighbor or to prevent me from harming another person. Oddly, many of those people who celebrate this supposed "good book" and it's message do exactly the opposite.

>> ^choggie:

This kind of non-news here, as well as the link in the description (another absolute non-issue, poorly written), and its being reported again here, is the type of diversion created by paying attention to it at all.


I just thought this was funny. Not news to me, more like comedy.

This kind of non-news here, as well as the link in the description (another absolute non-issue, poorly written), and its being reported again here, is the type of diversion created by paying attention to it at all.

I read the book when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old- I absolutely loved it. I tried to re-read it in my twenties- oh my God it was horrible- mindless, idiotic, poorly written, terrible dialogue... just couldn't get more than a few pages into it. It was like it was written for idiots and 11 year old children. Kind of like that cult Hubbard invented.

The movie sucked hard, but I'm kind of with @marinara with this one- so bad it's enjoyable on some level or other.

Yahtzee really needs to get over his fear of playing with others in order to review a game like this. It's not like you have to be social in an online FPS, or even good. The teams are often so large that your contribution hardly ever decides things anyway. And you don't have to listen to annoying children obsessively spewing the three swear words they know if you don't play on a console.

Really it wouldn't be painful. Just imagine they're robots. Then you get to enjoy a more challenging game, with no scripting, better maps, more weapons, vehicles, and no poorly written characters.

Did you read the article "Diagnosing Benny Morris: The Mind of a European Settler"?



I skimmed through it. It's poorly written, short on direct facts, and has no attempt at balance. It is not the sort of source a person uses to learn about something, it's the sort of thing you read to bathe in confirmation of your already entrenched opinion. It's also from a different time - a time of a much larger, open conflict in the region and a time with different attitudes. In short, I don't think it would be near the top of my reading list if I was trying to understand the current conflict. And I'm not starting some journey to understand the current conflict. You may think that's horrible. I'm not bothered.

I trust that is a satisfactory, direct answer to your question - will you answer mine directly?