Phi for All

Perhaps you're right and my mechanic is overcharging me, but if so please don't tell me by how much until I've already paid him. Perhaps you're right and that is arsenic in my potato salad, but if so please don't stop me until I've eaten it.

Perhaps this was Pelosi's attempt to avoid the inevitable quote mining we've come to expect from the GOP. If you really stop to think about it, it's a very proper, logical response. Was she really supposed to reduce a huge document down to a digestable sound byte that may have been misleading in it's simplicity? After the Bush administration, I think we owed the whole world some apologies. Bush's "power means never having to say you're sorry" attitude was extremely undiplomatic. There's a big difference between seeming strong and being barbaric. When in Rome... Do you think the same about the traditional Japanese bow? Not every culture shakes hands, and diplomats learn very quickly not to offend. Do you think these cultural greetings are akin to kneeling before a superior? I assure you, they aren't. Both Bush presidents used to kiss the Saudis. Why doesn't that bother you? Sorry, but this one sounds like a partisan complaint. If the guy you like did the same thing, he'd be "outsmarting" the guy you hate. But with Obama, you call it "browbeating". I don't want to take things off-topic for all these issues, but I do think it's important to show you how many other perspectives there are to these issues. One man's "genuflecting" is another man's greeting.

Well, the two aren't really the same, are they? If I'm reading a scientific article, I'm not really expecting to have any input at all, unlike a science discussion forum. I personally don't think discussions proceed much when devolving into complaints about criticism. The vast majority of ideas don't work, and it doesn't help anyone to linger longer on those that start out flawed. If the person with the idea can take the criticism on board and work with it to hone future presentations, everyone benefits. And there's always the danger of lending tacit support when you don't point out flaws and someone else takes flawed information as supported theory.

Oh, dude. Discussion is like conversation. A wall o' text is like someone who won't let you get a word in edgewise, and it makes it really difficult to get to the meat of the topic. And when you're basically complaining with a wall o' text, you're making a lot of eyes glaze over. No offense, just sayin'. Don't conflate refutation with ridicule. Especially here, we make a distinction between attacking the person and attacking the idea the person has. We don't allow the former, and the latter is just part of the process. I seriously don't see the point of everyone else walking on eggshells to protect one person's ego. I think it's much more efficient for the one person, the person with the idea, to grow a thicker skin, and realize that it's not personal when someone criticizes their idea.

! Moderator Note Even though this topic seems to start with invoking Godwin's Law, please keep all comments civil and on topic. Thanks!

This tells me all I need to know about your arguments. If you truly "know the talkorigins arguments" and think ANYTHING from AnwersInGenesis is more plausible, there is nothing I could say that you wouldn't dismiss with the kind of intellectual dishonesty and rigor-free reasoning used at the AIG site. Imo, there is no other place on the web where so many people who haven't bothered to understand science regularly ridicule it.

That particular thread is under review, since it basically invokes Godwin's Law right at the OP. Learn what censorship really means. Please forgive us for taking a bit long to figure out how to pre-warn people not to simply flame you for comparing today's scientists with Hitler and the Nazis. Your obsession with all things Greek and Nazi Germany is already starting to wear thin with some members, based on the many comments and complaints we've gotten. Edit to add: Review complete, thread re-opened.

Maybe it was just some old shoe polish. [/greatest straight line EVER]

We shared your findings with the scientific community and they demanded more evidence. So we brought in a team of experts and also determined there is bear hair stuck in the bark of the nearest trees, the tracks around the area are from a bear and the tracks lead to a nearby stream that has berry bushes along its banks and the remains of fish that have been caught and eaten near the bear tracks. One of the experts heard a roar, set up some recording equipment and was able to record another roar that all of our experts agree was made by a bear. Moontanman's dad claims that Sasquatch sound just like that, and he still says the experts are wrong.

If you believe you have the clap, you can get a Peter Pan at your doctrine's office.

I'm sure you feel the same way about Nobel prize winners. Athlete's only offer entertainment after all, at amateur and professional levels both. Nobel prize winners often advance the global society, and work as hard as any athlete. Or do you think only physical pursuits are worth your special interest?

My personal favorite is the path of the laryngeal nerve. Goes from the brain to the larynx in the throat (which is a pretty straight shot and a short distance in most vertebrates), and while it serves a purpose, the nerve's path goes way down into the chest and loops under the aorta, then back up again to the throat. In giraffes, it's like 15 feet long! The single best example of why ID is wrong, imo. It just happened to get caught that way when we evolved from a small fish when the heart got rearranged by selective pressures and a gill function got taken over by a need to make sounds. Not chance, natural selection.

Doesn't it make sense that a much less sophisticated nucleic acid existed before DNA? Early life didn't need sequences with so much structural purpose. Life started simple and evolved to current complexities over billions of years, we have observed the evidence of this. Since you capitalized KNOW, you should learn something else about science. It's not about KNOWING or PROOF, it's about the explanation that's best supported by reliable evidence. Again, you really should learn more about the things you ridicule with such fervor.

From your link, the first one, not the redundant second one: Taxes on income do NOT equal punishment, so I call BS. Substitute "NFL Players" for "Olympians" and you can see how the rest of the claim is also BS. And who is Mark Rubio to claim "We can all agree"? This whole thing is a blatant political maneuver. I would sooner exempt non-commissioned military personnel from income taxes before I'd advocate it for Olympic athletes. Btw, if you read the study all this was based on, the taxes on the actual medals themselves are $236, $135 and $2 respectively. Hardly a "punishment" that needs yet more new legislation and additions to the tax codes. Just more hand-waving to make us forget Wall Street crimes, the economy and unemployment.

Here at SFN, we recognize that if you call someone stupid, it's a personal attack, and is against the rules. Calling someone's idea or claim stupid is perfectly OK as long as you can show why you think so. Please don't take attacks against your ideas personally, they aren't meant that way and they aren't insults. I guess the best advice is lighten up AND toughen up.

So, is the reason it's not considered a true flash mob because the act they performed wasn't pointless? Then I agree with the title, I want more like this.

I've always wondered why this wasn't the default position for creator-believers.

I wish you had the time to study what you're scoffing at, you sound like such a smart person! Life wouldn't have started with a nucleic acid as complex as DNA, it just needed a strand with the blueprints for its own reproduction that could catalyze reactions in some of the available chemicals. Please stop using DNA as an example of irreducible complexity. It wasn't around when life formed.

I think "mockery" is just your perspective. It's like a Cirque du Soleil performance where they pull someone out of the audience who later turns out to be part of the troop. A mild deception, not a mockery. In this case, the music was chosen perfectly for it's layered effect. The audience may have thought it was spontaneous after 3 or 4 musicians joined the song, coincidence after 5 or 6, and after that they were probably just wondering how many more people were going to show up. When the chorus joined in from the crowd for the final movement, I don't think anyone cared that it wasn't spontaneous. The regular folks came to the square for one reason or another, and ended up in the middle of an unexpected performance of one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

I gotta say this, rigney. No one is calling you an idiot at all. If you sense people talking down to you it's not your stance, it's your failure to support it. You thought Olympic medalists were being taxed on the value of their medals, you were corrected, but you still persisted, changing the goalposts to say that Olympians should get a completely free ride, even from taxes. Then you tried to turn it into a liberal/conservative issue, which baffled most of us, since it's difficult to see how political leaning has anything to do with how athletes are taxed. And now you're saying, "Nothing should be right or left, but for the good of the people as a whole." Right after saying (regarding exempting government employees from paying taxes, including the military), "if you are proposing this as a liberal issue, forget it." Sometimes it's hard to guess what your stance is, and sometimes you misunderstand the issue, but the part that's most frustrating is when you admit that no matter how much evidence we can show you, it's not going to change how you feel about the issue. This is a big problem here, and it's a big problem with our country as a whole.

Anyone remember when Bush II used a contextomy against McCain in the 2000 Republican primary? His campaign aired a commercial quoting McCain's hometown newspaper, The Arizona Republic, as saying, "It's time the rest of the nation learns about the McCain we know." It was aired as a warning, very ominous, and they went on to talk about his voting record on some cherry-picked issues. It was really effective, iirc. The actual Republic article, after the mined quote, went on to talk about how admirable McCain was, and how they were supporting his campaign completely. Apparently the strategy works on Republicans as well as Democrats, but the real culprits are the ill-informed public that fails to check sources that support what they want to believe.

Since everyone wants the tax system changed, yet it only keeps getting more complicated, that should tell us someone wants it to stay that way.

Well, yeah, obviously. Look what happened to the Amish in Texas.

I'll bet rigney goes for that in a big way! And it makes sense as well, even more than with government workers. Oh, nice one, since it's always bad if it's liberal. Actually, I always wondered why government workers weren't simply offered tax exemption on their government wages as part of their compensation package. It would cut down on a great deal of paperwork and expense. Then I saw what politicians make....

! Moderator Note Do you want me to remove that single question poll or were you going to give some options? And it may just be me, but I'm not sure what you mean by "feel black".