Here is fake nonconformist and here is real one.
AlexM
I mean, jeez, have you seen how women behave in the workplace? They crave the occasional spanking.
Indeed, what workplace could be without discipline? Be assured that your boss, just like you, regrets the rotten and degenerate liberal age we are living in and looks forward to the day when he can properly discipline you.
2) Men with guns are always at the ready to take men away who dare discipline their women.
You are stronger than “your women” so you can discipline them at your pleasure. I don’t see why you complain when the men with guns, who are stronger than you, discipline you.
Who regards cryonics as evil like child molestation? General public sees cryonics as fraud—somethink like buying real estate on the moon or waiting for mothership, and someone paying for it as gullible fool.
For example, look at discussions when Britney Spears http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2520762/posts
wanted to be frozen. Lots of derision, no hatred.
Maybe in the 80′s, when we were only a few Satan worshipping nuts, but we are now in 21st century where science fiction and fantasy decisively won and is The Mainstream Culture now. Of 10 biggest grossing movies of the year, all are F/SF and role playing games are worldwide multibillion industry. Someone who does not know who is Harry Potter and what is Warcraft is the crazy weirdo :P
IMHO, the best “test of irrationality” would be acceptance of alternative medicine.
It matters little whether you believe in global warming, but belief in homeopathy, faith healing or anything else that makes you to delay the official thing, will make difference in your life, and not for the better.
Evolution is no threat to religion.
Evolution, paleontology and geology and biology in general are definitely threat to religion in both forms most popular today—strict Bible/Koran conservative literalist faith and fluffy liberal one.
The first is simply proven wrong—the world was not created in six days, there was no worldwide flood, etc.
And the case for all-loving, all-forgiving god or “spiritual force” is refuted even more decisively.
What is left open is the case for the supreme bastard of the universe, the obssesive-compulsive psychopathic sadist who painstakingly designs 500,000 species of beetles and then watches how they devour each other. ;-)
It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.
And if you look to policies preferred by the McCarthy and other hardcore cold warriors (WW3 or ceaseless Vietnam and Afgan-like wars all over the world) and value life and well-being of non-Americans, every one of the 205 or 78 or 57 communists on Tailgunner Joe’s list deserved to be awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, together with equivalent awards of all nations of Eurasia.
What? Everyone remembers the Albigensian Crusade. “Kill them all, God will know His own.” And if heretics won’t repent you should expel them or kill them. I agree with the Church on that one. There are demons who would mislead the people, you can’t just let them get away with it. You know what happens when you don’t kill the heretics? Communism. And communism killed way more people than the Church ever did.
I see you are fan of Marx and Weber. If Protestantism leads to capitalism and capitalism leads to communism, it makes sense to strike at the root of the evil.
Unfortunately, one fact kills the theory—in Catholic countries, communism was extremely strong and popular, while in Protestant ones communist parties were nearly nonexistent.
Sorry, but that sounds like motivated stopping to me. Coming up with ways by which blind evolution and guiding divinity might be compatible isn’t really hard at all.
What is hard is to make compatible evolution and all-loving divinity. To watch how ones creations torment and devour each other for hundreds of millions of years is not exactly my idea of love.
Even if ignore all problems ofderiving ought from is, there is problem which parts of nature we are supposed to follow.
If Darwin says “kill them all, the strongest will survive”, then Kelvin would say “kill yourself, why bother waiting to heat death of the universe?”
Our current civilization runs lots of computer simulations, nearly all of them are for entertainment purpose. For one “ancestor simulation” trying to be accurate there are millions of WoW and other games with no attempt of realism whatsoever.
Therefore, we if we are in simulation, we are orcs and trolls waiting to be slaughtered by players for few measly XP :-P
For real life example: one Russian kook preaches exactly this doctrine—strong atheism combined with strong belief of immortality of souls. Add holocaust denial, moon landing denial and admiration of Stalin as greatest hero that ever lived and you have something that sells dozens of books and gains many dedicated followers. Any more about him would belong to “irrationality quotes” thread if one existed...
Cryonics wants to be small, or why should the future want you?
All this technical discussion misses what I see as the major problem of cryonics if it works as advertised—why should the future want us?
Imagine if today were discovered few frozen Homo habilis and had technology to revive them. After, they would spend their lives in comfortable zoo that is paradise by ape men standards ( plentiful food! no dangerous beasts! warm shelter!)
Now try the same scenario, but with few millions of our frozen ancestors. The results will be same—at best, few dozens would be picked to be resurrected and studied, but I cannot see us welcoming millions of new hairy citizens.
Conclusion—to me it seems that if you want to maximize chance of future society resurrecting you, keep cryonics as close guarded secret of tiny elite...
Well, they shouldn’t do it anymore, for obvious reasons. But at that time it was a good idea. The Reformation led to a shift in values and political structures that reached one climax with the French revolution
This is the reason why the French revolution happened in Catholic country that followed your advice and extirpated all heresy without mercy.
The quote above? Not obviously wrong, just not even wrong and as unfalsifiable as any proper conspiracy theory should be.
Of the “enemy” regimes listed, US went to war only with Nazis and three of them were valued NATO members. One can call Vietnam and Korean wars in a sense limited, because US refused to use nukes and escalate into full WW3.
I wouldn’t comment about Israel, because there is nothing more mind-killing that discussion about Israeli/Palestinian politics :-(
The argument from metaethics was outdated from the beginning, at least for Christian apologetic purposes. Moral laws of all tribes and civilizations are compatible and are completely opposed to message of Jesus.
Natural law says: love your family. Jesus says: abandon them and follow me. Natural law: love your friends, hate your enemies. Jesus: love everyone. Natural law: defend yourself. Jesus: do not resist. Natural law: defend your property. Jesus: give up everything etc, etc....
For pure pragmatic reasons, peaceful methods would be still preferable to violent ones…
This is the first article to analyze a large sample of terrorist groups in terms of their policy effectiveness. It includes every foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. The key variable for FTO success is a tactical one: target selection. Terrorist groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumber attacks on military targets do not tend to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature. Contrary to the prevailing view that terrorism is an effective means of political coercion, the universe of cases suggests that, first, contemporary terrorist groups rarely achieve their policy objectives and, second, the poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself. The bulk of the article develops a theory for why countries are reluctant to make policy concessions when their civilian populations are the primary target.
Buying lottery ticket as a purchase of fantasy is irrational—fantasy is for free. You can dream about being a millionaire without spending money on tiny scrap of paper :P
I hear this from cryo skeptics all the time. Doubts—not so much as to whether it >works or not, but as to whether the patients who could be revived are human or not.
No, the question is whether the advanced posthuman civilisation will see the frozen primitive men as human beings.
How many resources are we spending to save and improve lives of apes?
If cryonics works in the first place, it means everyone who could be preserved but >isn’t, is a human casualty
The purpose of cryonics , at least as as advertised here, is to save specifically your life, not humanity in general. And, for the purpose, is simply better to be one of a few rare specimens than one in a mass.
and everyone who could be reanimated but isn’t is stuck in a coma against their will.
why would they care about our will?
Death will then be viewed as something extremely uncommon and in need of >extremely good evidence before medical procedures and ethics can be cast aside.
death of one of them, yes, but one of us?
One can argue that holocaust denial is an attempt to bring nazism closer to modern ethical values. Real, authentic Nazis were proud of their achievement and would be outraged by thought that their successors would call them a lie.
Some people do :-P