Phi for All

We should keep people like this away from anything to do with legislating public education, if we want to move forward with the rest of the world. I wasn't comparing Carson to Trump. I was commenting on your preference for president.

Ben Carson was hammered by scientists who couldn't condone his anti-evolution stance, and historians who scoffed at his absurd Egyptian revisionism, and psychologists who labeled him a Dunning-Kruger test candidate. It was all those damned leftist, elitist intellectuals that probably influenced the Democrats to hammer on him also.

Your own bias aside, many Dems saw Hillary as a second choice over Sanders. If there was as much evidence of collusion as there is with Trump, I think the Dems would have been happy to boot her and go with Tim Kaine, and let him choose another VP (Sanders?). In fact, I'm extremely surprised the Republicans back such an odious man with obvious Putin ties when their own VP is like a GOP wet dream, a creationist conservative with a clean record and a hard stance against Russian interference.

Republicans support the FBI when it suits them (like during one of the many, many, many Clinton investigations), and treat them like big government feds interfering in their personal business when it might cost them (like if Trump colluded with Putin). This is one of those times when they get to shove the boys in blue under the bus because they're federal authorities (and that's bad apparently). They've embraced a rancid stain of a human being just because he won for the party. Can you even imagine how the Republicans would be reacting if Hillary won but did what Trump has done (GOP reaction to Hillary firing Comey - BOOM)? Can you imagine they would be pressuring the FBI to ignore Russia and just move on?

! Moderator Note I split this more subjective, philosophical discussion off from the original, which is in Physics.

! Moderator Note A major chunk of discussion, starting where Furyan5 takes us away from physics with the phrase "Physics tries to seperate from subjective experiences", has been split away to here. At that point, the discussion became more about philosophy than the physical nature of light, and friction naturally occured. So let's be clear, this thread is in a Physics section, and the other thread is in Philosophy. Sorry for any inconvenience.

! Moderator Note If you can't be civil, you can't stay here. Do you understand? It's our #1 rule.

Given enough time, I have no doubt we could figure out some sort of interface with equipment that allows a brain in a jar to "see, hear, and talk". I don't think that's the point, though. I think removing the brain from the body would change you as a person enough to raise the question, is it really you anymore? As others have mentioned, we're conditioned both chemically and experientially by being in our bodies. Imagine one person, two timelines. In the first timeline, the person suffers a horrible accident and loses both legs, living the majority of their life as a paraplegic. In the second timeline, the accident never happens, and the same person lives a different life on two healthy legs. But is it the same person? Will what makes you you survive the removal of your body if we put your brain in a jar?

! Moderator Note Our rules state that you can support your statements with outside links, but you can't advertise your own stuff offsite. And members need to be able to participate without leaving the site as well. You're more than welcome to use parts of your "debate" in this discussion, but please don't advertise by linking to it.

And just like today, the crown's laws were being heavily influenced by out-of-control corporations like the East India Company, who had, over the years, negotiated virtually unlimited power. This was the main reason our own founding fathers heavily limited what corporations were allowed to do. Over the years, we've allowed MANY East India Companies to flourish, all bent on private gain, using public resources they don't want to pay for, including immigration programs, it seems.

! Moderator Note And it's also baseless conspiracy guesswork, and not something we encourage here. We can discuss the ramifications of cloning without speculating on specific Chinese motives in this case.

This is NOT true. From my link on the first page: Yours is an emotional stance with no basis in truth. It sounds like it could be that way, and those in power who oppose immigrants use this against you to get your support. Reality shows that immigration boosts wages in the working sector, and especially for existing workers who better understand the language and processes. Science helps me remove that emotional knee-jerk reaction, and think more critically about the world around me.

Lobbying for a purpose other than profit is against this administration's efforts to reduce public and state influence in our democracy, and our global scientific standing overall. One must assume they have crunched the numbers and don't need ALL of the air and water to be clean, just enough for the worthy. Absolutely brilliant bit of hypocrisy, though. Scientists are now lobbyists. Theory is guesswork. Logic just has to make sense.

And this will give some of those two-men energy companies who lost their multi-million PREPA contracts a chance to apply their expertise to wall building. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has been hinting all along how "complex" (aka "expensive") the wall will be.

I would say no. Consciousness behaves like an emergent property of many different variables.

The Democrats think the government can work to help, but they're obviously wrong because the Republicans can force it to shut down over this vote. Ipso facto, government is bad, so Republicans are good for wanting it to fail, which, of course, would be the Democrats fault. This is the part that really burns. When you don't have enough votes to get what you want, you compromise until you get enough votes. You don't shut it all down, then blame colleagues for representing their constituency.

I would sleep in, and not do anything involving machinery. When the hallucinations stopped, I would go downstairs and throw out everything in the fridge.

Yes, the bill has few bi-partisan concessions, the GOP wants it all their own way, but they don't have the votes for that, so instead of compromise, they allow the government to be shut down, costing us billions we really could have used, and blame it on the Dems because they wouldn't bend over and take it quietly. The bully rarely sees his demands as unreasonable.

It cost us $24B last time it was shut down. I feel like the Democrats are right to think this way. Remember, the Republicans want the government to look bad so they can shrink it or otherwise opt out of helping pay for it. This is more like playing "chicken" over the government, only one side takes up the whole road, so there's no place for the other side to swerve to avoid them. A better analogy would be a mugging, where the mugger gets all your valuables but also wants all the other stuff too, since he's got you here.

I'm heartily sick of all the gaming going on in our politics to sludge up the works and make "government" synonymous with "roadblocks to success". These technical tactics of not funding the government or else, or not approving the debt ceiling or else, the gerrymandering, and the hideous amounts of money and effort spent on reducing the effectiveness of the government overall goes completely against the spirit of what a government should be about. This is more of the throw-mud-on-it-then-call-it-ugly tactic used to sway voters emotionally away from reason. Who doesn't want an effective government? Those who have the wealth to do without one, and that's who we've got in charge.

A diagonally flying plane is either gaining or losing altitude, yes? Flying at a steep angle (diagonal is usually 45 degrees). A horizontally flying plane is flying straight. If you jump you will fall horizontally with the plane, and vertically due to gravity. Is this what you mean?

I don't think it's selfishness. Self-centeredness, perhaps. But I think the average person who identifies as "conservative" feels that everyone else but them is getting more of everything. The wealthy have more money, the poor get welfare checks, the minorities get special consideration, and here sits the "conservative" person who did everything the way you're supposed to, but got left behind. I get it. The problem is, I think they've been manipulated by powerful agendas. The good parts of their conservatism have been hijacked to serve the agenda. That's why you have small government "conservatives" arguing to let the government decide what we can put in our own bodies. It makes no sense, but they've been told it's "conservative" to act this way.

Because of the ensuing description, I assume you're using "staunch conservative" to mean "don't be stupid and wasteful", the way it was originally intended. Today's "staunch conservative" is marked by conflicting principles, such as wasting resources on fighting abortion (which has been and always will be necessary), insisting on "small" government that's allowed to dictate bodily functions and lifestyles, and cryptically demanding a "free" market approach that underhandedly favors some over others.

Your "final point", which is the same as the other times you've posted it, DOES NOT address what you make me keep reiterating: What "we've known for decades" was NOT the whole picture. We DID NOT "KNOW" everything they were doing to the environment, we were given false data on climate effects, and Big Oil propped its own market up unnaturally based on these deceptions. That doesn't make us all blameless, I've never said that. I've NEVER said "it's not my fault" (your strawman). But I'm unwilling to let you argue that we share equal culpability without challenging it. If you want to keep saying we're equally to blame, please address the above, as I've asked you to do many times now.

And at what point does this approach uphold our democracy, and their pledges to represent it? With only two major parties, when one of them is intractable it's like trying to ride a bike with one wheel frozen. And with the GOP in control of everything, it's the front wheel that won't move, and wants us to think the back wheel is to blame because it's spinning uselessly.