Phi for All

The fearful approach, as in investing in police and prisons assuming people will be criminals, rather than investing in people assuming they'll work to prosper themselves. It has fuckall to do with agreeing with me, mistermack.

Making drugs legal doesn't automatically mean they're cheap, nor does it mean they're necessarily easier for kids to get, unless your conservative local government is either trying to make money or hire more police. Your stance assumes we're waving a wand and making the laws disappear, which isn't at all how these things work. Look to Portugal, where they took the money they used to use for drug prisons and drug police (which deals with "addicts" without helping them) and spent it on rehab, counseling, and job placement (which helped real people overcome addiction). Cheap housing should be paid for by citizens and businesses who're interested in helping real people overcome problems so they can better participate in their own economy, rather than being the double burden an addict is now (at least in the US). And this garbage about everybody slacking off all day if given the choice is just conservative bullshit. It doesn't happen to the degree you try to scare everyone with. It's always been hard for me to stomach this fearful approach to societal processes, where we pay TWICE for security AND prisons instead of simply supporting our fellow humans the right way ONCE. You folks whose countries invest in universal healthcare have no idea what it's like for your country to charge you taxes without representing your continued existence. The US taxpayers spend more on the average prisoner than the average US taxpayer earns, and the total cost of incarceration to society (lost earnings, health problems, breaking up families) is up to three times the direct costs. All because conservative thinkers don't think we're ALL worth it, because some of us are addicts or poor or foreign or melanated or not Christian.

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! Moderator Note Thread closed then.

That's not the way I'd put it. If WWIII is going to happen, I'd say it's already started. Most countries are attacked daily by foreign intelligence services via multiple media, and that will be viewed in hindsight as a precursor if this becomes a global conflict. OTOH, I have different reasons to hope for a better outcome than I did two years ago. The threat from Iran has changed now that the regime there is being challenged internally. Turkey is in a different situation currently than it was two years ago. I honestly can't imagine what will happen between the US and China. Both are highly dependent on technology, and neither wants to risk damaging their own capabilities. I think Russia allowed their leaders to risk too much, and I hope its people are as tired of this authoritarian regime as Iranians are of theirs. I hope Putin continues to be vilified by most of the world, at least enough to keep China from teaming up with him. China doesn't want leaders who take over old territories to be criticized.

"Pointing out mistakes and flaws in an idea" is NOT the same as "intellectually attacking people". This seems to be something you've misunderstood for a very long time. You are NOT your ideas, your ideas can be wrong, and are in THIS instance. If I were attacking you as a person, it would be because of your behavior on discussion forums rather than an idea you've had. You think people don't like YOU, so you keep changing who you are, but it's your ideas that are flawed, and you choose to ignore that.

This is how I see it. My society conditioned me to react negatively when I see two men kissing, but since it's just two people showing affection it didn't take me long to change once I reasoned it out. Why would anyone continue to see it as disgusting or distasteful unless they also thought it was WRONG? I think that's the part of this that needs fixing.

Can you name some objective truths? What's the difference between reality and what we observe in nature? Also, what do you mean by creating life better than ourselves? Are you talking about having children that know more than we did at their age, or something else?

Actually no. If you skip the first day, you'll be skipping the first time around. You can't have a second time around without the first time. Also, if you skip the first day, it's like you're dividing the dish by zero, and you risk all kinds of undefined kitchen problems.

They all follow the same format. "You can't pet a hairless cat because 'petting' is defined as stroking fur! I'm going to insist on using this single, rigid definition no matter how you reply, even though I alone find it interesting and meaningful!" And the questions in the OP are always incredulity-based, which suggests they aren't being asked in good faith. I don't think it's a successful format for learning anything, and certainly hobbles any attempt at a decent discussion.

If the goal is "simplest" instead of "raising the most money", you are correct.

! Moderator Note Thread re-opened, sorry for the inconvenience.

! Moderator Note Opening posts should have at least some of the evidence you intend to use to support your assertions, if only to indicate that you know what you're talking about and that you're arguing in good faith, rather than simply making a declaration with nothing to back it up. Discussion needs others to participate, which requires that you give them a reason to besides your insistence.

Ignorance is a state we should be trying to correct constantly. Accumulated human knowledge is immense. Why are you making it about you personally? You're blaming yourself for not having something, thinking of yourself as an "idiot" for not understanding everything, and I think this is a problem. It makes you think of learning as "correcting your deficit", or "judging your capabilities" instead of "becoming even smarter" or "learning something new". You're a human, you have an amazing capacity to learn, and many tools that give knowledge deeper meaning and application. Nobody is exposing your ignorance when they teach you something, they're exposing your capacity to learn.

Tom Booth has been banned. The members here extended their help in good faith in an effort to update this poster's knowledge, but were ignored in favor of soapboxing.

What does "not enjoying" entail? Do you simply look away and not think about it anymore, or do you frown, make a disgusted sound or comment, and avoid those two people no matter what? I think the first behavior is about preference, and the second is about prejudice.

It sounds like we're working with different definitions of "prejudice". If you're judging a particular sex act with distaste, and assuming you've never actually engaged in said act, aren't you pre-judging it to be distasteful? Or is this a binary problem, where sex acts are only either enjoyable or distasteful? I have my own prejudices, and I try to fight them when I think they're keeping me from understanding. It's a struggle, based on my upbringing in the Midwest US, to overcome my kneejerk reactions to certain people and things. But it's worthwhile if it makes me more adaptable and accepting of diversity (which seems to be a strong trait in nature in general). I've acquired each of them for various reasonable (to me at the time) reasons. None of them were innate.

Really well said, and clearly supports that this is something we learned, we practiced, and can now change if we want to. It may be natural for any animal to fear something different, but humans seem to have enough intelligence to reason past it, if we want to.

! Moderator Note We have rules about wild-ass guesswork when it comes to science. People like you waste a LOT of time with your obtuseness. This has been explained before, but you have a really shitty, shitty style of discussion. You push your ideas while ignoring replies that run counter to what you're claiming. That's just preaching, and we are a DISCUSSION forum with rules against preaching. You act like you're posing legitimate questions, but you're repeating the same mistakes, which get pointed out, and then you ask people to point out your mistakes, which again shows you aren't listening. I'm going to recommend we ban you, since you can't discuss in good faith and just seem interested in wasting everyone else's time.

This reminded me of the term "massive", which is very different in science than in regular English.

That's not a great example, imo. People who smoke or chew gum/tobacco are often leaving the residue of their enjoyment for the rest of us to deal with. There's a reasonable stance against certain behavior if it actually impacts you negatively. But I understand where you're coming from wrt gum. I'm prejudiced against people who smoke, and I'm not well disposed towards someone who wants to talk to me while chewing gum. "Distasteful" is probably the wrong word to describe how we feel about someone else's sexual preferences. We need a definition for things we don't like people doing that has no impact on us (like their sexual preferences or the clothes they wear or their religious beliefs), and a different definition for behavior that does (like spitting gum on the ground or blowing smoke in someone's face or cutting in front of others in a line). And if a "distaste" for homosexuals extends to public affection when one doesn't object to heterosexuals doing the same, then I'd say that's homophobic. And that's what I see most; heterosexuals claiming that homosexuals are grooming small children or offending straight people just by being in the same mall or public area. It's the very existence of an alternate lifestyle they find "distasteful".

The Bohr model of the atom originally used "orbits" to describe the path electrons take. That's changed to "orbitals" with "shells" and "subshells" as we learned more and needed to distinguish between observed behaviors.

Your truth is a bit weird, though, in context of the rest of our lives, don't you think? If you aren't participating in something, why do you find others enjoyment of it "distasteful", unless you believe they're doing something WRONG? Do you feel that way about anything else people do? If you hate eating fish, do you put down those who enjoy it? Are they doing something "distasteful"? What about people who dress up in cosplay? I've known people who think LARPers and Renaissance Festival fans are weird, and that there's something wrong with them mentally because they're so into fantasy and dressing differently.

Why would you want to be misled by encouragement when an idea is flawed? Most ideas are wrong, and discussion helps us find the parts we need to rethink. Even while speculating, you should keep a foot firmly in the science we consider our best current explanations. Why are you taking any of this personally, when it's your ideas, not you, that are being discussed? Some people spend years working on their personal explanations for various phenomena, then start discussing it with peers only to find out they misunderstood some part of the science, or didn't use the right calculations. If you know the science mind at all, you'll know we can't NOT point out mistakes, and part of that is that nobody wants to see you waste good learning time.

Same here. The ratio was the important part, not the total. For years, I'd read that insulin triggered many bad things, including reducing cell receptors that call for cholesterol from the blood. Then the cells produce their own cholesterol, leaving the cholesterol borne by the LDLs to fall to the artery walls, to be retrieved by the HDLs for recirculation. Fats in the body need to hitch a ride with lipoproteins before they can travel in the bloodstream. That all made sense to me. Now they tell us the total is what's important, and if what I'd learned earlier is true, using a total number makes no sense, except that cardiologists get to prescribe a lot of statins. The old system seemed to take into account that our diets are all so different. I really dislike the one-size-fits-all methodology.