@hpqp: The first problem here is that you are extrapolating my response into something it's not. PostalBlowfish commented that "There is nothing positive to be gained from religion that can't be realized without it." My response to that has multiple points which apparently I haven't articulated very well. To add another though, it seems pretty clear that religious inspiration in art and music would be hard to duplicate without it, i.e., it is often the very nature of the supernatural belief that is inspirational. But to your point, that does not at all imply that I am "divorc[ing] the inherently negative aspects of religion/religious belief and the sociocultural evils it has often enshrined".

I'm not being naive or disingenuous - I've literally thought about this stuff for decades. In no way do I excuse any organized religion from its sanctioned evils (e.g., harboring pedophiles). For a long time I viewed religion as the source of many of the evils in society. But I've since come to realize that the evils directly attributable to religion are not intrinsic to religion, but to more fundamental aspects of human nature. And it is those fundamentally human traits that I think we, as a society, should be focused on rising above. Tribalism is one that I tend to focus on, and my point here is that religion is an expression of it, rather than a source of it.

Human's basic need to be tribal is kind of a big topic, so let me offer a more targeted, if tangential, example of what I mean. Consider the teaching of creationism in science classes. The most effective argument against it is that creationism is not science. Arguments against religious interference, separation of church and state, etc., only serve to muddy the waters and alienate the very people we would want to convince that creationism doesn't belong in science classes. There is no need to appeal to larger arguments against religion and doing so only weakens the most important one.

Split Lip Rayfield - Never Make It Home lyrics
Well the wind it is a'blowin' and I haven't seen the sun
I ain't seen much anything about a month or so
Coulda been much different, yeah, Momma she told me so
I never shoulda listened to the things she didn't know

CHORUS:
I don't think I'll ever make it home
[Swim that muddy water]
I don't think I'll ever make it home
[To feel the bright sunshine]
I don't think I'll ever make it home
[Swim that muddy water]
I don't think I'll ever make it home
[To feel the bright sunshine]

Well I had a chance to be someone I never been before
Took his clothes and wallet and I left him on the floor
I always thought it would be so damn easy to be free
Sing myself a different tune the Man came down on me

CHORUS

These bars are old and this room is cold an' I'm out of cigarettes
Sleep is so elusive and my clothes are soakin' wet
I think about my sin and as I make my final trek
It won't make no difference with that rope around my neck

CHORUS

this is how I always land my planes. You can just get out onto the wing and use it as a runway to your car so you don't get your shoes all muddy

Not playing it how Blizzard intended for it to be played is exactly why there is such an uproar over the game in the first place. Everyone wants to have their way with their Blizzard game and Blizzard ain't complying. Yeah the DRM sucks but there isn't all that much different in Diablo 3 than any other recent Blizz title. It's a scheme. Anyone who has played any of their games since War3 knows that the games are multi-tiered so what at first seems like a simple, boring, repetitive game ends up being finely tuned & crafted in the end. By ACT III on Nightmare mode it becomes apparent and if one doesn't get that far into the game then they really shouldn't be giving it a review because they should just know better from the get-go.

It's got some of the best multiplayer aspects that I've had in recent memory, running relentlessly across vast floors trying to avoid pools of Hell, or encountering impossible zombie mobs moving 50% faster than normal. It's a lot of fun. Blizzard is a different company than they were back in the day, I don't like it as nearly as much as the first Diablo, for sure... but it's still fantastic. It's still Blizzard. Great mechanics - for what it is - better art direction than most games, great sound and the absolute insanity of it on the more difficult modes where it really comes together. Yeah there are a lot of things that piss me off about D3...

I must admit it seems to me like Blizz didn't give it their all on this one... maybe so they can make sure people go back to their cash cow
The levels are barely random, what the ^%$# is up with the lag? There is too much loot like Yahtzee said, the normal mode IS too easy, nightmare & normal are light/day... don't waste our time. The art direction is great... but not as great as I'd expect from Blizz, muddy textures, accesses the hard-drive too frequently, some of those "cut-scenes" are whack, on Hell mode the random encounters are more difficult than the main quests, no in game auction house? Why the hell is that loot popup menu always there? The story is dumb as fuck. But, regardless that is what the Diablo series is - not much innovation here except in chaos and mechanics and that is good enough for me. We can't compare every Blizz game to WoW... and that is exactly why D3 is great, it's like WoW-ultralite meets Left For Dead, nothing wrong with that.

What you don't get from this video, and is very likely the case, is that it likely took several hours, and involved dozens of interactions with cops and probably complaints. And likely with the same cops over and over again.

At a certain point, forcing one of the jackass trolls to spend a couple of hours in processing before being released unscathed and uncharged seems a very reasonable way to stop the idiots.

Of course, the trolls wouldn't cut their video to demonstrate how reasonable the police were over the course of the day, but would you really expect anything more? If he had actually been charged, or even just given a fine for idiocy and making a general nuisance of himself, you can guarantee he would have spliced it in at the end of the video.

There's legitimate shit to worry about. Especially where police/public interaction is concerned. This sort of stupidity muddies the water and embitters both sides while achieving nothing positive at all. It's not even funny.

In reply to this comment by EvilDeathBee:
>> ^Confucius:

>> ^EvilDeathBee:
There's always some joyless old bastard.
Hope they sue him for wrongful arrest. You cannot let people like that get away with misusing their power

Cop is a douche but he has a point. Cops being called and sent around all over the city to stop people from fake peeing. Sure hope im not getting robbed when that happens when someone is fake peeing.


I think the pranksters are twats, but the cop arresting without cause is unjustifiable. Besides, who calls cops for people taking a piss? The suspect would be long gone by the time they got there. That cop would've had to have seen them then and there, and then got all pissy that he got pranked

My cat hates water but has a sort of morbid fascination with the bath tap. She'll sit and stare at the stream of water and the ripples...and then she treads muddy paw prints all over the bathroom.

>> ^Diogenes:

@criticalthud
let's be really clear... i agree with your position on corporate personhood
but... we can use "citizens united" to abbreviate the scotus decision: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission... and how that decision has overturned several previous legal precedents and aspects of bcra -- and we can also use "citizens united" to refer directly to the non-profit group of the same name...
i'm just pointing out the latter (the npo) filed suit against the fec because they felt that a media corporation (moore, et al) was violating bcra - the fec dismissed their complaint -- then the group made a similar 'documentary' about hillary clinton and promoted it with the same style and timing of moore's anti-bush film - a lower court barred it, stating that it violated the bcra -- this background led us to the troubling scotus decision
what i was pointing out was that bcra, etc, was already allowing corporate political advocacy through the media, i.e. movie producers, book publishers, newspaper conglomerates, and television networks, etc
this, imho, is what really muddies the waters


thanks i really appreciate the clarification. muddy waters for sure. You raise some good points. Especially in distinguishing an over-reach of political influence from entertainment and documentary media. But are we getting to the point where campaign finance legislation will necessarily intrude on free press and the works of film-makers? what is your take? I would prefer to think that legislation could and should be narrowly tailored in this instance.
and (edit)
@bmacs24 I think it makes sense to start with the fundamental underlying legal ambiguity by which the power grab occurs. The war on "terror" is another ambiguous area of laws that also leads to incredible abuse.
Otherwise you find yourself caught in the minutiae, trying to re-arrange the top bricks on the shit-stack

@criticalthud
let's be really clear... i agree with your position on corporate personhood
but... we can use "citizens united" to abbreviate the scotus decision: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission... and how that decision has overturned several previous legal precedents and aspects of bcra -- and we can also use "citizens united" to refer directly to the non-profit group of the same name...

i'm just pointing out the latter (the npo) filed suit against the fec because they felt that a media corporation (moore, et al) was violating bcra - the fec dismissed their complaint -- then the group made a similar 'documentary' about hillary clinton and promoted it with the same style and timing of moore's anti-bush film - a lower court barred it, stating that it violated the bcra -- this background led us to the troubling scotus decision

what i was pointing out was that bcra, etc, was already allowing corporate political advocacy through the media, i.e. movie producers, book publishers, newspaper conglomerates, and television networks, etc

this, imho, is what really muddies the waters

Still swiftboating and muddying the waters? Still not talking about Murray Rothbard's role in this all?





Well lets look at some actual facts:
----------------------------------BEGIN

In early 2008, this article revealed that "a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul" had identified Rockwell as the "chief ghostwriter" of the Ron Paul newsletters published from "roughly 1989 to 1994."

Financial records from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul—accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman's recent writings and audio recordings.

Rockwell has denied responsibility for the newsletters' contents to The New Republic's Jamie Kirchick. Rockwell twice declined to discuss the matter with reason, maintaining this week that he had "nothing to say." He has characterized discussion of the newsletters as "hysterical smears aimed at political enemies" of The New Republic. Paul himself called the controversy "old news" and "ancient history" when we reached him last week, and he has not responded to further request for comment.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
You don't think Murray Rothbard, is worth looking at?

"Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences." - Murray Rothbard
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

he also wrote film reviews under a pen name (anonymously) .. so he was no stranger to trying to protect himself while expressing what he truly thought..

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch5.html
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/07/murray-rothbard-lew-rockwell-and.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/still-states-greatest-enemy.html

----------------------------

In 1993, Rothbard wrote about Malcolm X and discussed the possibility of a separate state for blacks, but concluded that it would "require massive "foreign aid" from the U.S.A.". He also described black nationalism as "a phony nationalism" that was "beginning to look like a drive for an aggravated form of coerced parasitism over the white population."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard218.html

-------------------------------------------------------




I am seriously disappointed that people here can connect the dots to Dr. Paul yet Rothbard is clearly innocent.

He just happened to die in 1995... and we've heard nothing about newsletter content as inflammatory as when he was involved, since.

Get real people. It wasn't Ron Paul. The secret is in the grave at this point.

It was a great series, as was Long Way Down, where they ride from John'O Groats, Scotland, to Cape Town. I was surprised that they persisted with the loaded-up BMWs in the second series, though. The bikes were totally unsuitable for sandy/muddy conditions-way too heavy.

Conquest is a bit of a strange beast. On one hand you can extrapolate Sagemind's argument and say that we should respect the wishes of the existing indigenous population. But then on the other, what if another population of humans had existed before the Native Indians, shouldn't it be their land because they were there first?

That was the case in NZ, the country was colonized by the British and a great deal of the native land was taken for the Commonwealth. However the Maori's took a portion of NZ (the Chattham Islands) from an earlier tribe, the Moriori's - by pretty much butchering them, and keeping the prisoners captive and disallowing them to mate with each other so the race has dwindled out.

Was it ok for the Maori's to do that at the time because they didn't have the in depth written philosophy of ethics and morality that is available to us today. Is it worse that the European-Americans do this to the Indian tribes now that we have a better understanding of right and wrong available to us?

I know what seems right to me, but examining this argument in the context of history really muddies things up a lot.

As an example of why I don't think John (Fire) Lame Deer's argument can be used at face value is that while the native Americans may have had a fantastic and peaceful lifestyle a lot of the time, they killed and scalped their enemies and also appeared to have a really low life expectancy. Also, would the Native American's have done the same to Europeans if the roles were reversed? There were hundreds of Native American tribes, should they all be considered equally?

To remedy the destruction of their way of life what should be done? Should all Europeans leave America, (and every settler in every country for that matter). This is the only thing that would begin to give them complete autonomy the way they used to have it. Should we say "what's done is done" and try to make better decisions moving forward?

I don't see how this is surprising. (Other than the fact that a lot of people have failed to see it yet.)

American politics has a long history of putting in joke candidates in the running to muddy the waters in an effort to ensure victory for the other party. Especially in incumbent years.

A few thoughts:

1. Personal Revelation: I'm not sure why "God Told Me" is accorded a privileged, absolute position (by many, not sure if by sb) in terms of an information source. Surely a universe that includes supernatural beings interested in human behavior could also include a trickster-God capable of whispering things to someone or creating literally any kind of mental experience or situation (you know, for giggles)? Now, this could be claimed as a counterpoint to almost anything, and it's not really evidence for anything. It's not a good reason to not believe the whispering or something. However, doesn't it preclude absolute surety here? I mean, sure you could say it's more likely the whispering would be from the more powerful, "right" God - but, again, can you be absolutely sure? And if you can say "OK, I'm not absolutely sure - but I'm pretty dang sure" I think that's healthy. There's nothing wrong with picking what you feel is the vastly more likely explanation for an experience, I'm just objecting to the way some attribute absolute value here (again, not sure if this applies to specific participants of this discussion, but would value their thoughts here).

2. Punishment: I don't believe there's any "virtue" to justice or punishment. I think there's a practical societal requirement for deterrent to certain behaviors, and I think jail is a horrible, currently necessary evil (jail is marginally better than some other options, I think, because it mechanically prevents further offenses during incarceration as well as being a deterrent - and ideally it would provide education for reform, etc.. though I don't have much faith that that's happening currently). I don't understand the value of "justice" as an ideal or why it's seen as a virtue independent of these practical concerns. If people have free will and some are good and some are bad... well, whatever. As long as we can keep the bad people from hurting the good people (which, again, doesn't require any notion of justice), I don't see why we'd need to go about punishing anyone.

3. The End of Days: I will point out that shinyblurry's vision of how the whole final judgement scenario goes down is not shared by all of Christianity. There's significant variation between Christian denominations (though many of those, I assume, sb would not consider actual Christians - like Catholics or the previously mentioned Jehovah's Witnesses).

I think some of the confusion in this thread revolves around differing visions of judgement, differing ideas about what "Hell" constitutes, and the nature of God's omnipotence (which I think is a very big question). SB's posts here are essentially Theodicy, and that's a muddy job when these premises aren't well defined. I have some general ideas on SBs positions on these ideas, but I think it might clarify the discussion a bit if we knew his positions more clearly on things like:

1. Who will be in Hell, and does Hell include actual pain/torment (or is the torment more like, say, regret)?
2. What is the nature of God's omnipotence? Does it extend to control/creation of logic? What is his general relation to virtue/right?
3. What is the nature of God's omniscience, and what is your general conception of free will?

To be clear, I'm not trying to ask gotcha questions, or suggesting these questions don't have answers. I'm just asking what your answers are, as I think it'll clarify the discussion.

*nsfw for a lot of saggy boobs and a few muddy penises

>> ^robbersdog49:

>> ^Yogi:
And yet it's amazing to me that humans 100,000 years ago were faster...on muddy ground rather than with spikes on a rubber track. That's crazy!
Also...a rabbit could kick Bolt's ass

What?


http://playthink.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/manthropology/