Phi for All

! Moderator Note Tres Juicy, you've been here long enough to know this is an ad hominem attack and is against the rules you agreed to when you joined. No further warnings will be given. Your vacation starts with the next personal attack.

The problem is with your understanding of science. Proof is for mathematics; science has only evidence. Science isn't looking to prove anything, but it's very good at figuring out what isn't a fact. Scientists take an idea and test it, looking for evidence to both support and refute an idea. If there is much evidence to support the idea, it gets reviewed by even more scientists looking to both support and refute. If an idea has a great deal of evidence in support, and there are no refutations, it can go on to become a theory. Things like God or what happened at creation are not observable in a way that science considers supportive. Also, there is a difference between creation and creationism, so that may be hindering your attempts. It's easy to imagine that everything had a beginning, a creation point. Creationism, however, is a set of beliefs that contradict empirical observation at virtually every point.

! Moderator Note Villain, you don't get to decide who responds to this thread. You started it, but you do NOT own it. If you feel someone has broken the rules in their response to you (or to anyone else), then use the report feature at the lower left of each post. As to the posts you are questioning, this is a science forum. And even though we allow members to discuss philosophy and religion, if you make claims which can be refuted or contested using scientific methods, the rules state that you must either address the questions posed to you, or retract the claim. Please note that your opinions are your own, but they can't be stated as fact unless you can back them up. Do NOT respond to this Modnote.

I hate it when people ascribe luck to outcomes where it was really their own hard work and focus that was responsible. Still, I know that lucky items can boost confidence, so it's hard to fault them for that. I really hate it when people blame bad luck instead of admitting they should have been better prepared. People like that make me reach for my lucky baseball bat.

Remember that the scientist has peers who review evidence and test conclusions even when the scientist can't. Those other scientists get an almost equal amount of recognition for finding flaws and refuting evidence and falsifying hypotheses. Within the scientific community, someone is always testing virtually every theory almost constantly, looking to reduce the uncertainty in what we see as the best supported explanations for various phenomena. Science is constantly honing and polishing and tossing out what no longer works. Can you really say that about religion? Isn't most religious doctrine considered sacred and practically etched in stone within a particular denomination? And when things do change in religion, they rarely make sense to me. It was a venial sin for Catholics to eat meat on Fridays, but Vatican II lifted the restriction that had been in place since the 9th century. It can only be assumed that those who died prior to Vatican II without confessing about their Friday night brisket would still be staked out in Purgatory while their post-Vatican II counterparts get to pick the beef out of their smile on their way to Heaven. And while the Catholic Church considers itself to be infallible, the Pope was only granted this prestige in the late 19th century, where he promptly gave retroactive infallibility to all the popes before him. Nice trick, no rhyme or reason, solved a bunch of problems without the need for a time machine.

Little by little, wages have been frozen, benefits cut and workers made too scared of layoffs to complain about it. As union are broken, the bar gets lowered more and more. This was going on long before our current recession. And while older workers are being laid off in favor of younger workers, the level of pay for new college graduates has been declining since 2001. And all this when US corporations are wealthier than ever. Appropriations bills get passed that favor one company over others, due to the efforts of that company's lobbyists. I don't know about you, but I don't want my taxes spent that way, especially when many of these companies are dodging taxes and employing fewer Americans in their American company. A level playing field means companies compete on their merit and market capabilities and not based on how many politicians they have in their deeper-than-ever pockets. Firstly, only 13% of US workers belong to unions. Second, I'm against the whole concept of already successful companies lobbying for special favors from our government representatives. It's nothing more than legal graft to me. And who controls the nation right now? Corporations. Why would they make policies that drive them anywhere but where they were already carefully planning to go? I'm stunned that you're blaming "the nation" for driving companies to sacrifice their integrity. But it still remains true. Congress can fix plenty when they're motivated. Why don't they fix the infernal labyrinth that is our tax system? Do you mean business at any cost? The founding fathers were so afraid of the powers of corporate charters that they regulated practically everything about them, from what they were allowed to sell, where they could sell it and even how long they could sell it. Over the years, corporations have always tried to get away with more and more, and we've always been able to rein them in again by strengthening the regs that get weakened. But now lobbying and PACs have become so good at what they do it's tipped the influence businesses have over our laws and appropriations. Is this really what YOU stand for fundamentally? They're advantages NOBODY should have. Are you really OK with people being able to pay for special favors from our elected officials?

"Smart" is not a very good qualifier to use in this instance. I would definitely say that the better educated you are, the less susceptible you are to religion. I think you'll have to share some statistics about the "lower divorce rates, higher marriage rates, sense of purpose" part. And your perception of happy Christians differs with mine. Most of the kids who bullied my daughter and her friends during elementary school were from heavily Christian families. Maybe bullying others makes them happy, I don't know.

Wages and benefits have been stifled over the years while profits have been increased. It's been a gradual process that has avoided open revolt. It's not just inflation that has caused most families to require two incomes. Are you saying you don't think it's suspicious that so many people are hurting at the middle while the top is doing better than ever? Our economy is like a tube of toothpaste; the bottom is sealed, the middle has been squeezed, and the stuff we need is just gushing out at the top. Again, when I say fair, I don't mean evenly distributed. I mean having a level playing field and applying the laws even-handedly. I mean NOT stacking the deck against small businesses by using no-bid contracts, or buying political favors with your campaign contributions to skew things in your favor. I mean NOT robbing the pension funds of your hard-working employees, or sending their jobs overseas so you can make more profit. It's a shame integrity has to be so alien. The IRS is a perfect example of something that the vast majority of We, the People see as needing fixing, yet it continues to get worse, so someone out there is making sure it stays broken for a reason. I once heard (a while back) that if we had a flat 12% tax with no exemptions or credits, we'd have all the money we need to run the country, and a completely level playing field with regard to taxes. I don't know if that still holds true, but it sure would be interesting to hear the arguments against it.

Because Westerners are much more likely to be completely removed from the process.

Coming on the heels of the Brian Cox misconceptions, aren't you a bit worried about launching press releases about your two-day old hypothesis (a theory is much more heavily tested and peer-reviewed)?

This sentence makes little sense, but it sounds like there's a chapter of the Bible you don't believe in. Please tell us why.

Thinking that cows produce milk year round is a very common misconception among Westerners. Many also mistakenly think we steal milk from the calves by taking most for ourselves, but nature's redundant systems ensure that a cow produces way more milk than her single calf would need. This makes very little sense to me. If everything deserves to live and we should avoid killing anything, we couldn't move for fear of breaking this insane moral code. We already have laws in most countries that prohibit indiscriminate destruction of animals and people, and we understand more each year about the roles even insects play in our environment. As modern civilization progresses, I think we'll continue to increase the respect for lives we don't need to take to survive. But why should we impose some kind of impossible moral barrier that we'll have to keep breaking and feeling guilty about? I think you're conflating the deaths of animals bred to live and reproduce for our benefit with unnecessary destruction of human life, and that's a weak strawman argument. Seriously people, isn't the real argument that you're asking for a world where there are only x number of cows and we don't breed them or eat them, which actually denies the very existence of 1,000,000x number of cows who would have been fulfilling their evolutionary function by living to reproduce? As long as they're treated humanely and their deaths have a minimum of trauma (which we can't even guarantee for ourselves, btw), then what is so wrong with a life free from predation where they get to eat well, have sex, drink clean water and live for a few years before fulfilling the purpose they were bred for?

! Moderator Note njaohnt, since you haven't been able to provide even a scrap of your "tons" of evidence in the Christian Evidence thread, this statement is not only a lie but it's also a thread hijack, which is against the rules you agreed to when you joined. In case you didn't read any of the other posts, this thread is about how atheists will handle explaining life and death to their children. It doesn't even look like you read the opening post, since your answer to the OP doesn't make sense in that context. Lots of who have done it, atheists?

I didn't think you were. My point is that the packaging is often what makes the products appealing enough to jump off the shelf and into the shopping carts. And sometimes, the more excessive the packaging is, the more value it's perceived to have. Some packaging is a theft-deterrent as well, making the product too bulky to be slipped into the pocket of a shoplifter. We're making headway there with radio-frequency ID chips, but there's a lot of controversy about privacy and the tracking abilities of those chips. They may protect against shoplifting, but so far nothing is stopping those chips from sending information to anyone with the proper reader, even after you've left the store. I totally agree that much of the packaging these days seems excessive. Right now the manufacturers are more concerned with the things I've mentioned rather than how much is going into the landfills. If we want to change all that, I think the best way to accomplish the goal is the same way recycling got a foothold. If consumers start purchasing more products that offer biodegradable or less bulky packaging, the markets will start leaning that way. Then we have to make sure the corporate lobbyists don't arrange to have the legal definition of "biodegradable" changed to the point where it's meaningless.

It's not the emotion that's the problem. When someone offers compelling evidence against your idea, you either need to refute it or acknowledge it. If you just keep insisting you're right while that evidence is still out there, then it seems like you're just trying to anger the rest of us in the discussion. And that's trolling.

Dude, you accuse me of leaning and following a pattern, then you make a statement like this. "Shared prosperity" does NOT mean "spread the wealth" or "rob from the rich to give to the poor". Shared prosperity means fair taxation, using our numbers to make sure the least of us is cared for, and working hard so we can consume the goods and services we all generate to stimulate a healthy economy. Shared prosperity does NOT mean tilt everything in favor of a few, scrape workers benefits to the bone for a little more profit and avoid paying your fair share to help maintain our national infrastructure. It's fair business practices and integrity in lawmaking. It's actually believing that your people are what make your business great instead of just posting it on the corporate website while you lay off another thousand people at Christmas. Shared prosperity, where we make a wage that lets us be involved in our own economy and political structure instead of working two or three jobs to make ends meet while your kids wonder when you'll have enough energy to play with them.

Your chart is for perception of corruption. I'd like to know how they rate those perceptions. Their parameters are probably for things like officials taking bribes rather than politicians working corporate-favorable legislation into bills. Corruption perception may not include lobbyists working within the legal parameters established by corrupt politicians. Now THAT is a specious argument. You know I advocate government control only where profit motivations are in direct conflict with the interests represented. I don't know where you get off claiming that's an ideological change. I'm closer to being an Eisenhower Republican than I am an ultra-liberal Democrat like Michael Moore. Eisenhower warned us about trusting the military industrial complex. I'm not going to go back and rehash everything we've discussed before. I never said corporations are evil or rich people are bad and you damn well know it, yet you keep misrepresenting what I've said. I'm going to let Ike say it for me, because he predicted our current fate. From his farewell speech to the American people in 1961:

Yes. Yes you can.

You're being misled. The progressive movement has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. This is right wing propaganda meant to straw man the real goal, which is to rein in the corporate influence on our democracy and take things like health insurance out of the hands of profiteers. We've discussed this many times and it pains me to have to go back over old ground. Are you really going to make me look up your responses to health insurance for profit? I think you simply don't want our corruption to be worse than other nations our size, but I'm afraid we're the frontrunners in that respect. It costs us twice as much to do things when, due to our size and affluence, we should be paying less. Did you ever see the breakdown on what Bush's no-bid Iraq War contract with Halliburton cost us? You'd think a single company doing EVERYTHING would be able to lower costs as opposed to multiple companies each doing a portion of the work, wouldn't you? We paid almost double in every instance, from craft services to oil well firefighting. Other countries may have corruption as well, but the US does it through channels and gets We, the People to sign off on the graft via patriotism, buried bill provisions and spun media stories. Again, this "share the wealth" crap is propaganda, same as "class warfare". What the progressive movement wants is for the wealthy to share in our tax burdens, and pay their fair amount towards the superstructure we all use. If the wealthy pay more, well, their companies use more resources and create more wear and tear on the roads. Capital gains, where much of the wealthy's wealth comes from, is taxed at a lesser rate than your income. That's just wrong.

! Moderator Note Your thread hijacking has to stop NOW, JohnStu. Respond to this idea or start your own thread.

A machinocracy?! I prefer We, the People, however flawed.

In my opinion, it's not how bright the politicians are, it's how corrupt the system lets them be. The government is a tool, and it needs to be shaped properly so it does its job well no matter who wields it. It's not just about establishing laws, it's about protecting the common good. I think there are too many conflicts of interest in most governments. In the US, we let the wrong people tally votes, people with a vested interest in one of the winners. We allow corporations to finance political agendas that benefit the corporations. We erode public trust every time we allow lobbyists to unfairly garner tax breaks or favors that no one else gets. What we need more than anything is smart AND ethical people in government, but power like that often attracts the worst. I think the system needs an occasional overhaul to fix the problems and get rid of conflicts and what isn't working to protect the common good.

Great point. These animals are ultimately left with two alternatives, exist this way or don't exist at all. If they had the choice, do you think they'd choose to live the life we're giving them or would they choose not to be born at all?

I consider his not hiring union labor to be hypocritical. I don't know how movie budgets work; does the studio set the budget or does MM? Either way there is hypocrisy there on someone's part. It's the only thing in this whole thread about hypocrisy that even IS hypocritical. Suing his partners over royalties is just business though. It sounds like he audited the Weinsteins and discovered they were holding out on him. I laughed at how your article made the Weinsteins seem like old ladies on a fixed income that Moore was kicking to the curb. If you were being screwed out of almost $2M, would any amount of money already in your pocket make you think that was OK?

We evolved high intelligence and other traits that, in combination, lets us not only cultivate land for crops (which no other animal is capable of doing), but also raise animals for food (which no other animal is capable of doing). For now, both of these things help us maintain the civilization we have. We can't stop doing these things overnight or we'd cause the whole thing to collapse. We're using the advantages evolution gives us, like any other animal. And like most things, we're working to improve the process. Animal cruelty was much worse in the past. We need to continue to improve the huge animal processing facilities, no doubt, and I believe it will happen. Right now, science is improving tissue engineering to the point where we can grow organs and skin in a lab for medical use, and the same technology might just get us the perfect steak one day. Lab-grown, never part of a living being and who knows, maybe we can reduce the risks of heart disease as well.