geez, @A10anis. hokey/melodramatic much?

next time just try say somethin' like "wow, that's fucked up."

p.s.
human = animals. true fact

>> ^rougy:

>> ^bcglorf:
Can someone explain the Greek riots to me? I've only followed far enough to have picked up that they are in opposition to the austerity measures being enacted by government? What I've heard sounds like the government spent so much on social services that it went bankrupt, and the protesters are angry that the government is now attempting to cut back it's social services.
I'm not of strong opinion on this like I am in many other situations, but the balance of what I've heard sounds like the anti-austerity protests are so much whining that everyone wants their free money and maybe if we shoot the messenger the economy will recover.

The brunt of it is that Greece is in trouble, and the majority of people who will have to pay for it, or endure "austerity" as the fatcats like to say, had nothing, zero, to do with the trouble.
I've been trying to find out what went wrong there, but I see a lot of smoke and few specifics.
Naturally, any time the blame can be laid on social programs, then that narrative will be most promoted among America's mainstream media.
Frankly I think it was a combination of things, and some of it may have been related to the same CDO swindle that bankrupted Iceland.
But I'm sure you'll agree that if Greece went nuclear, all of their problems would be solved...just like Japan's....

EDIT:
Two words: Goldman Sachs.
Goldman was criticized for its involvement in the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. Goldman Sachs is reported to have systematically helped the Greek government mask the true facts concerning its national debt between the years 1998 and 2009.[76] In September 2009, Goldman Sachs, among others, created a special credit default swap (CDS) index to cover of high risk of Greece's national debt.[77] The interest-rates of Greek national bonds have soared to a very high level, leading the Greek economy very close to bankruptcy in March and May 2010 and again in June 2011.
(Wikipedia)


Thanks Rougy, that's the kind of starting point I was looking for. I was hoping getting the opinions of few folks on here who'd already researched the matter was a faster place to start than wading through the sea of information out there blindly.

Still sounds as though Sachs role in this was to help the Greek government irresponsibly spend itself into oblivion. I'm still curious, and will have to dig, what that money was spent on. I know even in my country(Canada) our social services are scaled well back from Greece's, and ours are already at the breaking point of what our tax revenues can bear. Added into that is our taxes are generally higher than those in Greece and it seems that Sachs helped them postpone the inevitable, and made it worse. None the less, it also sounds like the population were the recipients or targets of the majority of the money and are now more angry at the slowing of the spending than at the debt load.

Again I'll have to look at it further. As one poster tried to call me out, I am not strongly convicted and convinced my opinion on this is correct or accurate, I have merely expressed without hedging or hiding what I hold to based on what I admit as my limited information and am asking to be proven wrong to speed my process of correcting my opinion should it be based on wrong assumptions. Rougy's pointed a big path I wasn't aware of. Anyone else have some more? Particularly around where Greece's government revenues come from and were they are spent? My perception that most of it is going right back to public services is pretty central to my opinion and I'd love to know if I'm wrong on it.

>> ^bcglorf:

Can someone explain the Greek riots to me? I've only followed far enough to have picked up that they are in opposition to the austerity measures being enacted by government? What I've heard sounds like the government spent so much on social services that it went bankrupt, and the protesters are angry that the government is now attempting to cut back it's social services.
I'm not of strong opinion on this like I am in many other situations, but the balance of what I've heard sounds like the anti-austerity protests are so much whining that everyone wants their free money and maybe if we shoot the messenger the economy will recover.


The brunt of it is that Greece is in trouble, and the majority of people who will have to pay for it, or endure "austerity" as the fatcats like to say, had nothing, zero, to do with the trouble.

I've been trying to find out what went wrong there, but I see a lot of smoke and few specifics.

Naturally, any time the blame can be laid on social programs, then that narrative will be most promoted among America's mainstream media.

Frankly I think it was a combination of things, and some of it may have been related to the same CDO swindle that bankrupted Iceland.

But I'm sure you'll agree that if Greece went nuclear, all of their problems would be solved...just like Japan's....



EDIT:

Two words: Goldman Sachs.

Goldman was criticized for its involvement in the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. Goldman Sachs is reported to have systematically helped the Greek government mask the true facts concerning its national debt between the years 1998 and 2009.[76] In September 2009, Goldman Sachs, among others, created a special credit default swap (CDS) index to cover of high risk of Greece's national debt.[77] The interest-rates of Greek national bonds have soared to a very high level, leading the Greek economy very close to bankruptcy in March and May 2010 and again in June 2011.

(Wikipedia)

you can't be hungover if you're always drunk...>> ^bareboards2:

True Fact -- the title of Hangover 2 in France is "Very Bad Trip 2." Is it because the French don't know what a hangover is?

True Fact -- the title of Hangover 2 in France is "Very Bad Trip 2." Is it because the French don't know what a hangover is?

I'd like to add that purely by the numbers, among 90% of American non-Atheists does it not seem logical that there would "of course" be less bad stuff and more good stuff (purely materially speaking and completely disregarding spiritual and mental peace) purely because there are less of them? by a 9:1 ratio. i.e. less people... less bad stuff. I would also like to think that there are far more non-atheists that are in poverty, are illiterate, in jail, etc. because when you are in a position where you are force to come face to face with actual reality and not a "Material Reality" you can't make yourself feel better by eating, taking a shower, having sex, spending money, etc. God is constantly talking to everyone. This is what I, and any true Non-Denominational Christian who believes the entire Bible and won't over emphasize certain verses and take others out of context will believe. When humans are put in situations where they are challenged they will instinctively try to make their environment or body "feel good" or just try to make it less uncomfortable. When you don't have that option you have two options (more probably but this is for effect) One, you become bitter, angry, or sad and decide to live your life that way. Two you decide to actually listen to what God is telling you and your life is radically changed and you don't care entirely what your surrounding environment is like. (Jesus was homeless by the way) I'm not here to argue, I am simply replying and informing you of why the (what little true) facts are in the video.

Just to bring some sanity here:

I live in a place called blackpool in england. About a year or so ago, we had a very large transport ship run aground on our beach. Our local council shut down a large portion of the beach parallel to the boat - something like an exclusion zone.

I heard various reasons from "for safety" (which completely makes sense when you have a few thousand tonnes of ship resting on its side) and "exclusion zone" (which i think means for safety) to "we don't want people stealing cargo."

I think you should just settle down a little bit before you go screeching about freedom and oppression, it could be something as simple as safety and common sense:
1. What if people get stuck in the oil/engine problems from boats/anything like that?
2. What if people exacerbate the problem in some way - intentional or accidentally whilst trying to implement some hair brained scheme of their own to 'help out'?
3. What if people think they can somehow steal the oil?

If any of this shit happens, BP would be culpable for that and they've got enough on their hands with trying to save their own fuck up. I think people should keep the hell out, personally, and give them every opportunity to fix such an important problem.

I don't mean that press shouldn't be allowed in or that we shouldn't recieve the TRUE facts and news about the ongoing disaster, just make sure BP allow helicopters and such, release the correct and full information. Do it properly, keep the sensationalism out.

Trying to take a boat straight into a disaster area where they're trying to do cleanup and limitation and they're also floating around an oil rig trying to put a cap over it - and everyone is amazed that they're saying 'err please don't do that? we're trying to solve a problem here'

No news, imo. At least from the stuff i saw in the video. There's got to be SOME rules around a disaster area, otherwise you'd get everyone hanging round making it more problematic and introducing potential further disasters and accidents.

It's not illegal to "F" a Unicorn! "True Fact!"
But it should be illegal to sing this song dressed like these guys!

Many Americans head to Thailand for affordable medical treatment... Just thought I'd through out a random but true fact.

>> ^blankfist:
Firefighters aren't fire insurance. There actually is a thing called fire insurance. Maybe we should socialize, universalize or whatever you want to call it fire insurance. fear politicking with loose logic. I want the corporations out of health care, too. But, this is silly.


Your description of the fear channel is:

A place for videos exhibiting examples of fear, the use of fear to control and oppress, fear of differences, terrorized people and animals, paranoia, distrust, fear of death, and phobias.

Is pointing out the true fact that private insurance companies can deny claims, and that the uncovered medical bills can bankrupt you really qualify for *fear?

How about anti-smoking ads that tell people smoking can cause lung cancer? Is that fear too?

How about videos that say war leads to the death of innocent people? Is that fear too?

Using fear to oppress people is saying "Vote for me, or the terrorists will kill your children".

So is saying that our current health care system can lead to very bad outcomes sometimes, and that an alternative could prevent that "the use of fear to control and oppress"? Is it the "fear of differences" or an example of "paranoia", "phobias", or "distrust"? It can't be "fear of death" since there is no death mentioned. No terrorized people or animals appear in the clip, either.

If anything, the real problem with comparing health care to what we do with fire departments is that fire departments are more government run than what's being proposed by even the Kuciniches of the Democratic party.

Firefighters are employees of the government. There's no insurance at all. That's like Britain's NHS, not like a Canadian or French style single-payer system.

If we had single-payer fire fighting, we would actually have privately owned and operated fire stations who compete for contracts with the government, who then pays them with tax money collected via a progressive tax structure. But they wouldn't deny your claims.

The medical equivalent of the fire insurance you're talking about would be disability coverage -- and we do have that socialized, universalized, or fascistized or whatever the fuck you fear mongers want to call it when you're trying to use fear to control and oppress the majority of people in this country.

I would like to add to and refine IAmTheBlurr's comments.

I haven't thought about this specific point much, but it does seem reasonable to say that atheism is not a belief system. This would mean that, in addition to the possible atheistic comments Blurr listed above, we could add "Huh? A god? What's that?". That is, a person who had never been exposed to any supernatural idea would also be an atheist. This is the point that Sam Harris is trying to make--that atheism is the default state of a mind. I suppose this means that agnosticism is a subset of atheism, although agnosticism has the additional connotation of "and I don't care".

Incidentally, it is not the case that nothing can be said about god's existence. When it comes to considering the veracity of claims, the notion that we can only say "true", "false", or "I don't know" is an oversimplification. Instead, every claim exists on scale from 0% to 100% probability of being true. The only things that exist at 0% are those that are logically impossible, and the only things that exist at 100% are those which are a logical necessity; any claim which depends on "facts" is somewhere between, but not including, 0% and 100%. A 0% claim would be "I am standing 15 feet to my right"--a self contradiction; a 100% claim would be "I am right here". "I am on Pluto having tea with green Martians" depends on facts--observations, measurements, etc--so it can not be 0% or 100%, but we can easily imagine it's so close to 0% that in a casual conversation we would say it's impossible.

There are various definitions for "god". People learn the meanings of words not by some Matrix-like scenario where a perfect copy of the information is transferred into their brains, but by how they see the words used and not used in their everyday experiences. Every individual has a unique set of experiences, so everybody has unique definitions for every word they know. This, by the way, means it is important to define relevant words when having a serious conversation; this is done in both science and law. Any definition that is self contradictory has a 0% probability of being true. We all have contradictory beliefs; it's impossible to review every idea you've ever had every time you form a new idea. A difference between a rational person and an irrational one is that the rational person is willing to reevaluate his ideas when the contradictions are brought to his conscious attention. Any god whose entire definition is "all loving, all knowing, all powerful" is arguably self contradictory if you accept disease/war/etc as true facts.

Any god definition which contradicts facts that are sufficiently close to 100%, and which has no other facts in its favor(I happen to know of no supernatural god definition with facts in its favor) will be comparatively close to 0%. So, a god that depends on creationism is so close to 0% that in casual conversation we would say such a god is "batshit lunacy". This is the case for the god defined by the Bible, as a whole, as well as those of the Torah, Koran, and most other religions.

Even if you have a god definition that is not self contradictory, and has no facts for or against it, its probability of being true will be closer to 0% than 100%. One line of reasoning works like the following. The number of possible propositions a person could make, alternatively the sea of ideas that are either true or false, is infinite. But the number of things that are true is finite(if you don't want to buy that, then "there are an infinite number of false variations of each true statement" works as well). Thus, a proposition with no facts for or against it is essentially just a random item on this list of all possible propositions, which contains more falsehoods than truths, and so the proposition is most likely false. People have intuited this on their own and it shows up in all sorts of contexts, such as the legal system's presumption of innocence.

Based on all the above, most people's idea of god is so close to 0% it's as false as the idea that the moon is made of cheese.

Full disclosure: I consider myself an atheist. I think that religion is untrue, inherently dangerous, actively harmful to individuals and society, is child abuse, and needs to be eradicated.

True fact:

I actually know someone who used to date shatner. Her name is Hellen Hilliar, the two of them met because they both worked in theatre around here in ze Canada.
To this day, she says he used to be an arrogant prick.

As does most of the crew for the original Star Trek series

I think that's commie code. Shit! They're invading!

>> ^firefly:
Meters? km? centigrade? What IS all this crazy-talk?!

I know you were. Gave me something fun to do.

In reply to this comment by firefly:
aw, thanks, you didn't have to do that, I was just razzin' you!

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
converted a few of them. Will finish them up latter.

aw, thanks, you didn't have to do that, I was just razzin' you!

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
converted a few of them. Will finish them up latter.