The Good Post Gallery

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Every day of my life. You give your meaning to these words that cut such a wide swath that resonate for you, and I will give mine, which do the same for me.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

My first impression is to say we should simply ask some conservatives rather than guessing about it ourselves.

In lieu of that, I figure that culturally conservative folk have grown fond of well-established principles, traditions, and institutions in politics and often look for gradual, cautious means of improving upon them without having to embrace entirely new strategies or reject what they consider to be tried-and-true theories. They are not really anti-intellectual so much as highly suspicious of folks who assert society ought to undergo fundamental changes, not entirely opposed to equality so much as aware that human beings are unequal in a number of significant ways by their very nature and that hierarchies encourage productivity and order via a system of incentives; and they are not intolerant zealots so much as they like the social norms of their nation and do not want those norms to rapidly change - either for better or (as a worrisome risk) for the worse. The conservative has a less idealistic impression of "human nature" than do many of their opponents, and is hence okay with deterring or coping with certain social problems (e.g., poverty, crime, recidivism, war, greed, politically incorrect attitudes, etc.) instead of pumping vast quantities of resources into what might very well be futile efforts to wholly do away with them. We ought to be strong, respect our leaders, honor our sacred customs, support our own, and make do with what we have got - not stick our heads up in the clouds like naive dreamers. We've a lot to lose from unneeded gambling.

The progressive or radical can easily seem elitist, deviant, rude, reckless, malcontent, and detached from reality.

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It's not so much that this is sane, it's that the idea that there's any analogous basis for constructing a view of the world that is sane is immensely problematic, unless you're selectively defining sanity to mean agreement with your own position, or using it as a shorthand for the most common types of mental processes in a population.

Ah yes, very good point. The problem is that I fully embrace the insanity in my trying to understand things I don't or can't. The point of religion is that it provides people with infinite understanding if they can communicate with a being that created and fully understands all. It puts people in a mentally destructive state of believing in their own belief. I have complete doubt in my reality, but religion depends on the absence of doubt.

It purports to, but there are ways of doing religiosity that can leave room for doubt or even introduce more doubt. Interacting with God (through prayer and mystical experiences) doesn't render me positive of God so much as it does less positive of the rest of my interactions. I do believe in my own belief, but that's because there isn't much else to stand on, and I recognize that that's the reason.

Of course, if the question were 'Is belief in God as most commonly processed in the minds of less-than-mystically-inclined believers harmful to society?', I'd have a different answer. It's just that I don't agree that secularization ameliorates the part of this that's the biggest problem.

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I have to say that the way both sides present the debate on Climate Change seems to be quite fallacious.  I mean, from my view there are two sides here that engage in a level of naivete that is reserved for people who think Professional Wrestling is real:

Side One: THERE IS NO CLIMATE CHANGE!  AND IT IS DEFINITELY NOT MAN MADE! (foams at mouth)
Variation: Yes there is Climate Change, but it is definitely not at all manmade.  It's soooo natural man!

And then there is the other side of the debate, mostly agreed on by "feelgooders" and socially conscious PC liberals:

Side 2: Climate change is real, it is caused by humans, BUT WE CAN PREVENT IT FROM GOING ANY FURTHER!

(facepalm)

I mean really, no wonder why a bunch of people find this debate to be so mindblowingly stupid.  What did people think happened to industrial gasses?  That said gasses were converted into Angel Farts?  Seriously!?  Industrialized areas are known to have higher rates of cancer and lung problems....yet people are shocked that industrialization could possibly lead to Climate Change?  The Earth is changing, yes it's our fault, AND NOW WE ARE NOW HOISTED BY OUR OWN PETARD!  THE PETARD OF INDUSTRIALIZATION!

So yes, the alarmists are indeed right.. . .  . .until they have the audacity, the nerve to say that we can be saved.  That we can actually stop this process.

We are beyond salvation right now.  We would need f***ing Star Trek technology to reverse the trend.  Sure, you could argue BUT BUT GREEN ENERGY!  BUHBUHBUT GREEN TAXES!  Yes, and wearing a WIN button will stop runaway inflation.  Such policies are at best "feel good" and don't do what needs to be done: reversal.  We don't need to stop the trend, WE NEED TO F***ING REVERSE IT.  And with the level of tech we are at I would love somebody to enlighten me as to HOW with technology where it's at how we ever hope to stop the Climate Change process.

If there is ever a case to be made for Futility, this is it.

But you know, maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe there is some data I'm overlooking that suggests that climate scales and graphs are wrong and that there was significantly more climate instability in 980 AD than now.  Or maybe there is some tech out there that, if given the funding, would somehow reverse the current trends and there will be a snowy winter in 2032 IF WE ACT NOW.
If so, then please, enlighten me.  Because so far I don't know why people waste the same amount of time on this issue as they would on more meaningful issues, like the amount of latent homosexuality in Top Gun.

I see the Evolutionary psychology is strong in this thread. This is inevitable for this board, at least so it seems (in "sex threads" anyway).

As for me, I'm in no position to be picky, so I'm like whatever....

Surely everyone subscribes to at least a few aspects of evolutionary psychology, no?

As I am a person (AFAIK) and thus included in the description of "everyone", the answer would have to be 'no'.

You honestly don't agree with any aspect of it? Why? I'd like to know why I'm wrong.

Well on the issue of sexual attractiveness it is worth noting how little in human history and life sex has had conciously to do with reproduction. We are mammals and like mammals we have social sex - the notion of a 'mate' may have little to do with anything.

Furthermore, differences of what defines attractive have changed so much throughout human history and still vary across the world that create rules on this issue seems absurd. (And of course throughout human history whether you were attracted to him/her or not did not matter one fig when it came to your eventual mate(s). There are still large parts of the world that are like this). However, the idea of sexual attractiveness AFAIK seems to be pretty universal - I could give a cod evolutionary explanashun about this. But I could do the same if the opposite happened to be the case. After all, if our 'role' in our lives is solely to reproduce (this idea, though considered Darwinian in some circles, isn't at all really. Creatures don't have purposes) why have this strange pickiness about it?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

realistic's response after that was good as well.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Torie had a valid critique of Mikado's post, but still, it and Nathan's reply belong here.

My current identification is "none," not atheist.  Atheist is so constraining, leaving atheism was like taking off a straitjacket.

I would be interested in "hearing" more about your personal story as to the bolded part, if you are willing Mikado.

Atheists tend to be impossible to talk to regarding everything I'm interested in and passionate about.  I love to debate theology, but (afleitch and Dibble are good examples) tend to always go "that never happened," which is totally a nonstarter and besides the point of what I'm trying to talk about (I always approach works from an in-universe analytical point of view, and "God doesn't exist" is frustrating in the same way as "Raskolnikov doesn't exist").  If I want to discuss whether Krishna's argument with Arjuna that he is a divine, all-seeing entity is an appropriate backing-up for his claim that Arjuna, as a Kshatriya, has to follow his Dharma to go into battle (is "I'm Vishnu and you're not" an argument with legitimate moral force?), I'd always get a response of "Krishna/Vishnu and Arjuna never existed."  If I'd try to talk about the ethics of Jesus' pronouncements on divorce, I'd get some "Jesus never existed/didn't say that" response, which is basically the reason I stopped going into the Religion and Philosophy board.  It's intellectual sophistry of the first order on the part of the atheists to dismiss arguments from Sacred Texts as illegitimate because they weren't authentic: that doesn't address the actual meanings of the words at all.  I've read the Bible (Old and New Testaments), Koran, Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada, as well as extensive works by Augustine, Aquinas, some Schleiermacher, some Kierkegaard, etc. and anytime I try to talk about them I get a "God doesn't exist," followed by the person going to talk about the new Batman movie.  I've refrained from posting "Batman doesn't exist" over and over again. 

The existence/nonexistence of God is utterly irrelevant to the validity of religion and its study and the contemptuous dismissal of it leads to social diseases like positivism, the utter contempt for the past, and the slavish worship of the new God Science that are endemic in certain well-educated parts of modern society.  Michel Foucault writes in The Birth of the Clinic in specific and throughout his works in general how the medical and other scientific institutions have assumed the language and rhetoric of Truth from religion and have attempted to invalidate all truths other than the materialist, physical "reality" they peddle in order to enhance their own power, and its worked stupendously.  Foucault's "biopower," the power that physicians and scientists have gained through their obsessive categorization, classification, and prying into the most private and intimate aspects of human life down to our cells, nay, down to our DNA, has led them to have an amazing degree of control over all aspects of our lives, and the destruction of the substitution of religious truth and power with theirs is one of the key aspects of that rise.  His History of Sexuality Part I, Civilization and Madness, and The Birth of the Clinic in specific and his entire works in general have shown the huge disadvantages of accepting scientific truth as a cultural replacement for religious truth, and is one of the big reasons why he ended up fanatically supporting Ayatollah Khoemeini in his last days despite clearly not believing in God himself.  In many ways, Science is a far more dangerous master than Religion ever was, and the twentieth century has already clearly demonstrated that the road to Progress leads straight into the gates of Auschwitz.  "Modernity" and "Civilization" are orders of magnitude more gruesome and morally repugnant values than anything "Savagery" ever offered.

TL/DR I have no problem with the disbelief of God, I have a problem with the summary dismissal and rejection of religion and the blind worship of the false gods of Science and Progress, and that's what modern atheism entails.

I'm reminded of my Japanese language instructor, who's from a Zen priestly family from a very rural part of western Japan. Japan is what we'd call a religious society in a lot of ways but being given to much explicit religious thought isn't one of them. At some point between the Tokugawa era and the post-war (there's a lot of debate over this) most of the religious institutions in Japan stopped being taken really seriously in terms of truth-value, but what happened here is that many Japanese people stopped caring very much about the truth-value of their metaphysical and cultural narratives. Obviously this has led to problems. We can probably think of a really obvious one right off the top of our heads. But what this has meant is that aesthetically and culturally elements of this society have stayed more or less constant despite surface-level extreme secularization (and I do think that secularization is a process that admits of getting extreme or going way too far). This isn't in all ways a good thing but the last attempt to reverse or redirect the set of processes going on here led to State Shinto, which was at its core an attempt to rationalize--and, not to put too fine a point on it, contextualize within Modern ideas of the nation and the state and what constitutes 'reasonable' public reliogisity (this was of course a fascist context but fascism is still a type of modern context)--a religion that originally...well, the Atlantic recently ran a surprisingly good article on the subject of the De Beers cartel and I couldn't take it as seriously as I would have liked because it used the phrase 'Shinto law'. That's what Shinto is. It doesn't use that language. Christianity and Buddhism do, but that's not really what they should be about either.

I'm a little inarticulate right now both because I'm more tired than I am at this time of the evening and because my Internet is slow as sh**t right now and I don't know why, but I think it's worth considering the idea that the mechanisms for self-validation that modernist metanarratives claim are somewhat crueler than religious ones, because they don't validate themselves on their own terms but in terms of so-called positivist or rational ideals that everybody is supposed to hold or something. Which puts those of us who partially agree with those ideas but aren't willing to make them the absolute acme of values in an odd situation. Religious ideas may be more flagrant in their lack of immediately obvious resemblance to the level of reality that most people perceive most of the time but at least, except in particularly toxic examples of theocratic academia or government, they at least have that benefit. Since they're self-referential, as Mikado said, even if you don't believe in them, using your unbelief to shut down conversations about them is a dick move. Not even Paul of Tarsus did that, and he used other dick moves relatively frequently.

Beet: I think that we as a people privilege the idea of personal belief a little too strongly in some of these types of conversations.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The underlying issue is the number of significant digits in the result. In general, you only report a result with a precision on the same order of magnitude as your error, ie. if the result has an error of ±3 points, they would report down to the 1% digit. This convention is not quite practiced universally and some people prefer to include one extra digit so you know if a result is 44.6 ±3 or 45.2 ± 3 instead of saying just 45 ± 3, but it looks weird.

In polling, I think it becomes a bit trivial to include extra digits because even the statistical uncertainty in the measurement has additional errors built in from various biases that make polling results fairly unreliable in general.

When a polling company does this it makes it look like they missed the 10th grade lesson on sig figs or at the very least are using a non-standard form of notation.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

great advice and perspective on driving:

As my dad says, "wait until its cheaper".  Its better to be wrong than dead right.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The OP mentioned something about communities who elect such representatives.  And that brought to mind something a friend told me a few months ago, not exactly about this but about a related topic, but his point I think was a good one, especially given my memories of growing up in the relatively small community that I did.  His point basically was that often it's not so much a question about what one believes, but about who one believes.  Communities are a collection of relationships between people, and when one grows up, as I did, in a small community, where maintaining good relationships is particularly important, one's default assumption is that the people around you have, for the most part, your best interests at heart.  So, when they tell you something, you are more likely to believe what they say precisely because of the weight the relationship carries.  By contrast, if you hear someone who is a complete stranger who claims things about truth and reality and whatnot that contravene what the people around you are saying, then, absent any independent way to assess the evidence, there is really no good reason for you to believe the stranger instead of the people in the community, since you don't know what sorts of intentions the stranger has in telling you what they do.  Separating oneself from all that is hard, it was certainly difficult for me--why exactly ought I to believe, for example, someone I've never met whose claims I'm reading rather than my own dad?  Reasons to believe are often very abstruse sorts of things, trust that one already has in intimates and community members one has long known is often far, far more compelling.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

CountryRoads, the issue I think is that the "no abortion for rape" position is being defended horribly. If a politician says something like "it is still a human and has a right to life" it is much more tenable than when they try to hold to their position while dancing around it. It seems that is where Akinesque scenarios come about

     The issue is that there is this attitude in politics that your position does not have to be only tenable, but objectively and self-evidently correct in every possible sense. This leads to a lot of willful ignorance and a general unwillingness to have mature discussion of the issues. After all, admitting that the opposition might have a defensible point of view is just being a weak-kneed flip-flopper.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Reactionary.

The 75 thousand or so that they'll spend on a full-time rent-a-cop could buy lots of computers, or art supplies, or musical instruments.  At a time when teacher's are being cut and class sizes are being expanded to accommodate shrinking budgets, this seems like a poor appropriate of funds.

Call me a weenie, but I think it's overboard.  It also creates an extremely hostile learning environment.  The culture is pretty freaky already, without raising a generation of children who think it is normal to pass through metal detectors and in front of armed guards just to learn.

I guess I'm losing my erection.  I've generally been a defender of second-amendment rights, as you'll know from my posts, but if maintaining the right to arm means that we have to live in a police state, then I'd be willing to rethink it.

Dad, why is there a policeman in my kindergarten class?  Oh, you know how it is, son, for the same reason that there's an Early Pregnancy Test vending machine in all the girls' restrooms.  One in eight of your classmates will be arrested before his 30th birthday, and one is six will get pregnant before she is married.  This is all very normal stuff.  Just be careful the way you sling your water bottle around on the playground.  You may get a bullet in your head if you pull it out of your pocket too quickly.

That's a creepy world, Gramps.  Not a world I'd want to create.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

It's not particularly hard to find the 'roots' of Nazi antisemitism and you won't find it in either the Bible or On the Origin of Species. The ideology you're looking for is German nationalism and the term you're looking for specifically - though certainly not exclusively - is 'Völkisch'. Given how that term is pronounced I suppose that most native English speakers will probably find it difficult to take at all seriously as something extremely sinister and highly dangerous, but language can be deceptive and it certainly was. You should then be aware of the ubiquity of scientific racism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and of the popularity of related things, such as eugenics (c.f. the movement for 'National Efficiency' in Britain, which was pretty much the guiding political principle of one H.H. Asquith - a prick, but not even close to being a Nazi). You can then look at the (very, very successful) attempts of many 19th century arseholes to transform popular anti-Jewish sentiment (which was always previously based on good old fashioned religious bigotry... or, perhaps more accurately, was always expressed in its language) into the new fangled craze known as 'antisemitism', a new product that it made it possible to hate Jewish people while also being a thoroughly and respectably modern member of the new industrial society. You can easily see, I'm sure, how all of this combined at the wackier end of the German nationalist political spectrum (and that was always a pretty fycking crazy political spectrum as political spectrums go) to produce something as excessively and insanely vile as the Nazi variety of antisemitism. You think these people were at all interested in theology, even popular theology? Don't be daft. Actual scientific theory (at a theoretical level) as opposed to popular science? Utterly absurd.

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[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

2. Frederick Douglass was a Republican liberal, and it was Republicans liberals who fought to end slavery and segregation.  If Terry knew the history, he would be a Democrat conservative, especially since he had a George Wallace button.

2. Frederick Douglass was a Republican, and it was Republicans who fought to end slavery and segregation.  If Terry knew the history, he would be a Democrat, especially since he had a George Wallace button.

Ever wondered why scumbag racists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms switched parties? Liberals ended slavery, and southern conservatives happily fought against that... just like they opposed the Reconstruction amendments, women suffrage, segregation, and several more dubious social crusades that establishment Republicans pretend to have never happened.

We took the Deweys and Rockefellers of the world, you took the Thurmonds and the Wallaces and the Byrds.

That is one hell of an oversimplification justified on political grounds.

There is such a thing as a Pro-Civil Rights Conservative, arguably both Bob Taft and Everett Dirksen could be counted as such. The reason such unsavory people (like those you mentioned, not implying Taft or Dirksen were unsavory by the location of this sentence) joined the GOP wasn't because it full throated embraced dixie, but instead because it was the "lesser of two evils", as the party more inclined to advance a conservative ideal set, as opposed to the Democratic party, which was being pulled more and more to the left. A process that the GOP leadership encouraged through the use of specific and select issues that could just as easily by motivated by legitimate ideological views as they could by being a racist hater (the so-called "Southern Strategy"), which was adopted as a means to break out from its two region imprisonment and gain access into the SE and SW, both of which were more fertile ground for a conservative poltical party, then a party isolated in two regions dominated by unions, liberal ethnics and so forth.

The reason the GOP was more inclined to a conservative mindset in the 1960's, wasn't because of a hijacking but instead because of conservative influences in the Northeast (shocking as it may seem now, there were such bastions at the time. For many, Abolition and Prohibition were espoused by fervent Protestants wanting to export their beliefs to other people as means to "civilize them". Sound familiar?) and Midwest. Exemplified by the fact that as far back as Alexander Hamilton's (who gets counted as a Conservative and legitimately so) and John Adam's (another obvious conservative) Federalist Party, the party opposed to the Democrats (or Jefferson's party before them) had a conservative element of some form. That would include Lincoln's opposition to Popular Sovereignty on the basis of the promised freedoms being universal and thus untouchable to a transient majority opinion in a particular locale, which sounds a lot like the conservative view that the popular majority isn't always acceptable and should be checked by institutions (like constitutionally guarranteed and promised freedoms for one, or even just institutionalized precedents regarding such and those did exist at the time. They were ignored by the Supreme Court at the time which violated the Constitution, prior precedent and the Seperation of Powers to hand down Dred Scott. Sounds like a conservative complaint to me. Thanks to Mecha for finding the full Curtis dissent, I would recommend it to a friend).

Oh, but conservatism in the GOP came about because a bunch of racist Southerners hijacked the party in the 1960's, like that Ohioan name William McKinely in 1896 or that Ohioan Warren Harding in 1920 or that Massachusetts man Calvin Coolidge, who won not a single Southern state amongst them (save for TN in 1920 of course). There is something wrong with this statement, which should be obvious to anyone with objectivity, and that is basically a symbolic represenation of what you are saying. The notion that the party's just switched is one of the most blatant and stupid misrepresentations of history and is about as unnacceptable as blaming the Democrats of today for what Jackson and the boys did in 1830. Though, if I had to find a way to connect such to those unfortunate events of the past to the Democratic party of today, it wouldn't be based on nominal affiliations of a rotting corpse wearing a gray uniform (the oldiesfreak approach), but instead based on the designs regarding the critical institutions of our system and the long term risks from removing them. It would be more accurate to say that two parties with ideological diversity, subsequently went through a period of ideological polarization and thus resulted in a political realignment based on "current regional demographics", which in many cases had changed considerably over the decades. I am shocked, SHOCKED to find Irish in Massachusetts.

Conservatism in the Republican party wasn't the result of a hijacking, stupidity, that is a different story.

In fairness, I have simplified here as well, but the reason wasn't to misrepresent. It was to avoid a tl;dr post and to save hours that I don't have today. If anyone disagrees with what I said, I will be happy to defend anything posted here.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

People are posting me like I'm Scripture now?

Anyway, the point I was trying to make in that post was that I fundamentally reject the entire "Rationalist" ethos of the supremacy of, superiority of, and triumph of science.  Scientific thought, like any other school of knowledge, is fundamentally ideological, but science's advocates make claims to objectivity.  There is far more complexity and emotional depth to the human experience than Reason and Logic can ever plumb, wild waves of profoundly irrational emotions, forbidden desires, dark lusts, and crazed cravings that torment and madden us.  The Romanticists knew it and the ancients knew it, but modernity tries to reject it and compartmentalize and explain everything about us and the world we live in. 

Mystery, grandeur, the graceful, moral highs and the wicked, murderous lows of the human condition reduced to diagrams and technical terms in an attempt to crush the colorful fables and fascinating origin stories of yore.  I don't agree with "Christianity" on too terribly much, but on a sentimental level, its recognition of human wickedness and human divinty, of the chaotic, dark mess of the human spirit, is far more compelling than the vision of crushing us into mechanistic contraptions  of pumps and joints and electric signals and chemical triggers.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

All this seems so very far beyond the pale.

It reminds me of a time, when I was living in California, and it came to the ballot--the Westerners love their binding referenda; an excess of democracy if you ask me--anyway, the question came to the ballot of whether it should be allowable to ask one's race on hospital admissions forms.  This was about 2003 maybe.  I forget the exact date.  Anyway, I suppose it seemed important to the population of the California legislature at the time.  (The importance, one side said, was in diagnosing illnesses.  "Black" people, for example, had a much higher incidence of sickle-cell anemia, and knowing if someone was "black" would help in diagnoses of medical conditions.  The other side said that requiring knowledge of someone's race was tantamount to institutionalized bigotry.  It should not be allowed because it was contrary to California's constitution.)  The debate was widely televised, and most informed voters knew at least vaguely about each side's arguments.  At one point, a few days before the vote, a friend of mine was visiting my apartment, and somehow the conversation turned to this particular proposition on the ballot.  He immediately said, "Oh, I'm against that.  It's racist to require someone to state their race on a hospital admissions form.  Um, wait.  Yeah, I think that's it.  That's the racist position, isn't it?" 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaah.   Okay, then. 

Dude, stop asking what the "racist" position is or what the "environmentally-unfriendly" position is or whatever position is.  Think for yourself.  It's not as though one group of people is evil and bent on destruction and another group of people farts lilac-scented perfumes and only lives altruistically and wholesome.  (First, there are usually more than two sides to any argument, and second, mostly people just come to the argument with their minds already made up.)

Of course DDT kills bugs that spread malaria.  Of course it also causes all sorts of problems for other species, including humans.  That's pretty much the whole story.  The devil is in the details, and if you have different devils than the other devil, it doesn't make him the devil.  Go out and get a PhD in bioagrochemistry if you're that goddamned interested.  Even then, it may not tell you how to vote, but you'll at least be able to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of its use intelligently. 

As a voter, just get all the info you can, but for heaven's sake, don't go onto a forum populated by twelve-year-old posters and ask what the "right" position is.  (Here, I'm assuming that you're not one of the many twelve-year-old posters that haunt this forum.  If you are, forgive me.)

/rant

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Why are environmentalists so enthusiastic about the electric car?

Quick answer : The smarter ones ain't.

The other quick answer is that while environmentalism is fashionable in many circles, advocating that people actually need to change their way of life significantly is not. The electric car lies at the heart of the fantasy that we can "save the planet" without giving up any luxury or convenience.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I assume someone has noted that a substantial percentage of teens getting pregnant not married, etc. want to do so. They assume that the stack is wired against them, and they don't have a future, so why not feel important, and have someone to love, by having a baby?  This issue is not going to be "solved" by having more health classes, or birth control available. It's far deeper and more intractable than that.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

sad but true

I think the one thing I learned from these threads is how deeply ingrained the desire and sense of being right is here.  The Atlas forum is overall a self satisfied bunch. The culture is frequently bereft of any sort of consensus building or common ground in arguments these days. This I would think is a by product of being a rather homogeneous male bastion.  And I think of lot of this is based on class even more than gender.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Consider this my last word on the Memphis matter - something that I'd like to go for everyone, not just the man in question:

The true irony in all this is that memphis and virtually everybody trying to defend him from the lynch mob are all supporters of gay rights.  The actual bigots have remained silent this entire time.  C'est la vie.

Being decent to people who are different than you is better evidence of not being a bigot than is supporting gay rights.

You’re kind of missing the point and perhaps you can be forgiven for it for being pretty new here. What Joe was saying is that those who have been attacked for defending Memphis from attacks (which is different from defending what he says) are pro gay (for which read LGBT) rights. Joe certainly is.

you completely missed my point.


but this is the good post gallery and not the place to argue about this, so:

This is one of my favorites: a religion map. The data for Canada is from the 2001 Census, so it might be a bit old, but not too much. The data for the US is the most recent ARDA data with some adjustments I made: I took the adherents data and compared it to the ARIS survey of religious self-identification. I found that the data matched up nationally for Catholics and minor religions but not Protestants due to the about 14% of the population that identifies as generically Christian but doesn't attend any one specific church. So I adjusted for these "invisible Christians" to ARIS levels, and divided the new total adherents by the total adult population and fixed a couple other minor issues to get this map:



It's worth pointing out that "no religion" does not necessarily equal atheist or agnostic.

and the other maps in that thread.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I reckon disarmament would actually make the world a better place. Nuclear weapons did not prevent the continued outbreak of armed conflicts - whether minor or major in scale. Plenty of proxy wars were fought in far flung corners of the world, ethnic conflicts betwixt non-nuclear powers continued to occur, genocides still unfolded, and the Second Congo War during the '90s claimed millions of lives in Africa. Focusing on the nuclear powers in particular, the USA and USSR rather narrowly avoided an exchange of nuclear bombardments on more than one occasion and the destructive potential for such an onslaught makes even the bloodiest of conventional wars in history pale in comparison.

For nuclear deterrents to succeed in bringing about an end to major conflicts every country in the world needs to either have nuclear devices and means of reliably, swiftly delivering those devices to targets thousands of miles away or otherwise be under the umbrella of protection offered by a nuclear power. It does not seem that any nuclear powers tend to take a strong interest in extending such protection to LDCs in particular when there is nothing in it for them, and I reckon we can agree it would be a pretty bad idea to proliferate nuclear weapons and ICBM technologies so that most countries on the planet have at least a few of them in service. Virtually any armed confrontation could escalate into a wanton, mutual slaughter of millions even between the smallest of countries.

It would not matter if the deterrence works under ordinary circumstances because subterfuge and underhanded maneuvers could potentially be used by either state or non-state actors to - for their own benefit, obviously - set up other countries to partake in a nuclear confrontation by setting a device off at an opportune time and location. Even if we could enact measures to effectively safeguard against such ruses or at the very least ensure retaliation against the country of a provocative attack's origin, surely there would be terrorist groups capable of wresting control of at least a few of these weapons away from a LDC and, having no fixed, territorial location on a map to retaliate against, not be subject to the doctrine of MAD regardless of whether it otherwise generally works.

And to top it all off I must ask, what kind of righteous government would ever threaten to or actually intentionally kill tens of millions of innocent (and yes, most of them really are innocent) civilians to achieve their political aims? Hell - if I were in charge of a country and we got hit by nuclear weapons I would only order retaliatory strikes against military targets isolated from civilian populations. All it would take for a would-be aggressor to defeat such a conscience-driven regime as mine would be to nestle their bases in the hearts or peripheries of urban centers.

Personally, I would recommend proliferating ABM technology, offering to sell those missiles to any country that cannot afford to develop and fabricate their own, use treaties to scale down arsenals into the dozens rather than hundreds or thousands of nuclear devices, ban all forms of testing for nuclear weapons, try to convince countries to allow each others inspectors free access to verify compliance, and then eventually seek a worldwide treaty to ban them outright, with all nuclear powers getting rid of their last 1-20 or so devices at the same time. Likewise for radiological, biological, and chemical weapons. There may also soon come a time when restrictions on EMP weaponry and drones will be necessary, unfortunately. It seems countries that seek WMDs mostly don't want to be invaded and decisively trounced by overwhelmingly stronger opponents.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I see the importance of making countries interdependent, both politically and economically, and establishing global institutions for maintaining peace and security.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Keynesianism / Chicago School start from the equilibrium approach. Markets tend to balance demand and supply. That balance may be distorted on the short-to-medium term by several kinds of shocks, but, if the shock is diagnosed and treated correctly, the markets will balance themselves again. They differ in their analysis of shocks and the treatment to be applied. Keynesianism is focusing more on demand-side shocks (under-consumption), while the Chicago school is primarily concerned with monetary imbalances, (removing) regulative barriers to competition, and distortions due to government interventionism.
 
In contrast, the Austrian school understands markets as inherently imperfect due to incomplete information, incalculable risks, and individually differing preferences and utility functions. Entrepreneurs profit from these imperfections, but may also take wrong decisions and ultimately fail. As there is no equilibrium, it is also not possible to mathematically model economic systems via equilibrium equations.

I have a lot of sympathy for the Austrian approach, and even more for its extension by equally Austrian (though not part of the classical Austrian school) Joseph Schumpeter, with his focus on entrepreneurship and innovation. To me, monetary imbalances and under-consumption are not the root causes of economic crisis, but symptoms of an underlying problem, namely lack of innovation. In other words: People consume less, and enterprises face decreasing return on investment, because markets for existing products are saturated, and there are not enough entrepreneurs with new ideas and products that address latent but not yet apparent demand.

I have nevertheless voted for the Chicago School, as it has developed important concepts such as institutional economics and the idea of "human capital", which tie into innovation economics. Chicago school monetary theory, and Keynesian consumption theory are useful for designing supportive policies, i.e., both approaches don't create the innovation push required to get out of an economic crisis, but help such a push to become effective. Marxist analysis of rent-seeking behaviour has carved out the antagonism between capitalists and entrepreneurs.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

happened upon this in search:

This discussion is illuminating because it showcases a certain neurose I've noticed among partisan hacks (Mr. Moderate is probably not the best example, but it works for now).

The Reagan mythology is that he was some sort of great conservative pioneer who defeated the forces of liberalism, thereby bringing material prosperity and foreign policy success.  "Conservatives" adore the man because he represents the "proof" that their ideology is correct.  He therefore attains a quasi-religious status among Republicans (hence why every third word on the WSJ editorial page or in a GOP debate is "Reagan," and why they try to rename porta-potties after him).  For every hero, there is a demon that must be vanquished, and who better than that little flimsy flake known as Jimmy Carter?  For someone who views the world in such black-and-white terms that they actually think Reagan's election was some sort of major sea change in politics, it's easy to think that Carter, being the vanquished demon, must have had the exact opposite position of Reagan on every single issue.  Therefore, it can simply be declared, without the slightest bit of independent thought or research, that Jimmy Carter must have been an "insane liberal."

The exact same thing is true of "liberal"/"progressives."  Their worldview includes their own object of veneration:  Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Roosevelt represents their own "proof" that their own ideology is correct, and so he has attained the same quasi-religious hero status among them that Reagan carries among "conservatives."  For this reason too, the vanquished demon becomes Herbert Hoover, the root of all evil.  Hoover must have been some sort of dogmatic laissez-faire ultraconservative, whose devious machinations were ended by the virtuous Roosevelt.  It can therefore be declared, without the slightest bit of independent thought or research, that Herbert Hoover must have been an "insane conservative."

Of course, in reality Hoover was probably the most leftist president of the United States up to that point, and was to the left of Roosevelt on several issues, including several that "liberal"/"progressives" pretend(ed) to care deeply about (minority rights, foreign policy).  Carter was the most conservative president the US had since Coolidge (Ike and Ford might have been more ideologically conservative, but not in terms of the policy they implemented or tried to implement), and was to the right of Reagan on several issues that "conservatives" pretend to care about (spending, regulation, free trade).

An addendum:  Part of the mythology is fueled by the fact that in their post-presidencies, Hoover and Carter, hurt and confused that the groups they had always considered themselves a part of now considered them abominamenti, actually became the caricatures that were painted of them, figuring that they might as well at least enjoy the continued approval of the few who still approved of them.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Nah, the majority of the mod team have made it clear that they are far too lily-livered in dealing with habitually disruptive posters.  It's a forum tradition, after all.

I don't particularly mind continuing my own 'delete-on-sight' policy for his posts on my boards.  I've been doing it since about April, and nobody seems to mind.

If I don't see Krazen's posts and don't know of your 'delete-on-sight' policy, how am I going to know enough to mind?  Now that I know, I object to you summarily deleting posts of a poster in good standing.  Just because you disagree with Krazen politically doesn't mean his posts don't have value.   Whose posts will you summarily delete next?  Mine?  I don't agree with you on most issues, either.

It's sad that posting views that challenge the overwhelmingly liberal orthodoxy here is seen by some as trolling - and that is one of the reasons why I see myself posting less and less.

The trolling rap thing does suck, but just ignore it is my best advice. There is this assumption out there, that some ideas just seem so awful in the mind of some posters, that it just has to be performance art, rather than genuinely held beliefs. In some ways, I find that attitude rather arrogant. And yes, I find some of the content of some left wing posters so off the wall, that I wonder if it is just that we live on two different planets, or it's trolling. Does it really matter to me which it is? No. It is all part of the back and forth in the public square. And learning to deal with it intelligently, is part of growing up.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

the good post gallery is officially dead