Moontanman

In the quest for real honesty I will admit to being more than a bit obsessed with the truth, it was one of those things beaten into me as a child

I am sure that someplace there is a politician that wouldn't consider lying to gain political capital and of course everyone lies... We all lie every day, actually telling the truth every time you speak is close to impossible in our society, lies are like a social lubricant that allows us to go on getting along reasonably well. If my wife asks me if this dress makes her butt look big I know the correct answer is not a completely truthful answer. But when someone asserts something like Rape victims rarely get pregnant because real rape victims can shut down the process of impregnation.... I think we are talking about something completely different, a level of lie that is not part of the social covenant to avoid undue stress by not telling your wife her butt does indeed look big in that skirt... When politicians tell "stuff" they either want to be true or spin that "stuff" so it sounds true but they know it's horse feathers and only say it so they can get elected then the system has failed. We accept the little lies so much in our daily lives the big lies either become ok because it's for a good cause or we fail to see the lie because it is so big that it's difficult to believe that anyone would lie about something so important. We are bombarded by the big lie so much that it has become ok to follow a political party that quite literally lives by the big lie. We want the world to be what we want it to be that we would rather believe the big lie than catch a glimpse of the truth. One of the basic tenets of one of our political parties is to teach Genesis as science and to teach that science is just a hunch someone had last night over pickled eggs and cheap beer. Maybe the original post title is too ambiguous and maybe I have blown this lie thing out of proportion, maybe praying that the hurricane passed the republican convention by worked, they really are the party of God, how could they possibly loose when God diverts hurricanes away so it doesn't interfere with the convention! God really is on their side and all those godless Scientists really need to pray those storms away instead of studying them....

Why are lies generally accepted as OK in politics? No where else in our society, other than possibly religion, are lies the accepted means to an end. In politics sometimes it actually seems like the bigger the lie the better the result even when the people know it's a lie. Why does hearing what you want to believe seem to be more important than the truth?

I know people think I'm beating a dead horse on this but I think that the unholy marriage of the conservative right and the religious right has been the undoing of the conservative movement as anything but a win at all costs and let the prophets flow free has become the platform of the Republicans. This idea that one side is lying and we should lie so we can win and do what is right disturbs me in a very fundamental way. Once the lie becomes not the truth but a weapon to kill the truth because the truth will result in us losing.... I don't know, this is all very confusing for me and I think for many others. There is no longer a difference on what direction the country should go but which lie is easier to suck up. Religion openly asserts that lying in the name of God is not just ok but necessary, politics is almost by definition the art of lying to convince others of the truth, the merger of these two is nothing short of a nightmare... 1984 anyone? Who lies the most? I am obviously biased but can anyone say that lying is not the back bone of politics? That twisting the truth and perverting reality is not the name of the game? Politics has become nothing but a scam a ponzi scheme, making money by convincing people to invest their money on the hope that will benefit but no one benefits but the politician and his real owners, politics has nothing to do with representing the people, being voted into office is a free ride to making money hand over fist. The fact that being elected to represent us in Washington immediately allows you to do things like insider trading that the rest of us mortals would be arrested for. This simple fact is enough to attract criminals like bees to honey. Then you have the true believers... in every way as batshitcrazy as true believers in UFOs, Atlantis, Ancient Astronauts, Crystal Power and yes I'll say it... Religion... When an other wise sane and intelligent individual defends things his party says not because it's true or in anyway real but only because it's what he wants to believe. When these individuals ignore any and all evidence to the contrary when it is presented to them, when quite literally they will believe a lie instead of the truth simply because winning is all important and truth is meaningless what does that say about us as a society? As a people? Once you get to thinking that god is on your side all bets are off and the religious right has embraced the religion of riches and the success of what used to be fringes are now mega churches where money is the goal and the meter used to determine success. When greed becomes good Christian values and the pursuit of money is openly worshiped combining that with capitalism unchained the next step is religion unchained and that rolls everything back to the middle ages with modern technology to back up that philosophy freedom will be a meaningless word but Tea Party will no longer have anything to do with cups... To think this perversion of what it means to be an American started with taxes on diet soda at first seemed to be funny or at least ironic, I honestly didn't know how this perversion started, if it was some other country on some other planet it would be funny but it's us, the Reavers are coming, get your gun and shoot your self, it's the logical option....

Awesome... simply awesome...

Can you give an example of this? Can you give some evidence of this? Assuming the first two are true to support the last with no evidence of the first seems a bit premature...

Coffee with Claire, more dim bulbs and the GOP...

Isn't this a repeat of a recent question? Dogs would be considered ring species in one interpretation and sub species in another. If indeed the only dogs left were Great Danes and Chihuahuas and an outside source unaware of their origins were to inspect them they would qualify as separate species....

This movie "Steel Magnolia's" would give you a chance to hear several different Southern accents, from the upper class to the lower class accents... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Magnolias

Same guy again? He is nothing if not persistent. Bless his little heart...

Well... I never did hear tell of such a thing... bless his little heart.... A lot of it is colloquial sayings but speaking like fog horn leg horn helps some as well... I say I say boy you don't listen well do ya boy, not the sharpest knife int the drawer is he? now look heah boy i'm not a chicken, chickens have long floppy ears and big noses just like that critter over there, yeah that that one... now go get your self a chicken... the boy just don't listen not raised right i say, dropped on his head as a baby, made 'im lazy i think, laziest chicken hawk i ever seen....

I waffle back and forth between their biology being so different they couldn't be infected and so lacking in antibodies to be eaten immediately...

There are gay people because reproduction is never perfect, mistakes happen on several levels, I don't like to equate homosexuality with birth defect due to the negative connotations but it is true that problems in the womb both genetic and hormonal can tweak sexuality to outside what the majority call normal. Humans are not only born with there sexuality someplace closer to homosexual than hetero sexual, most human sexuality falls some place along the curve between the two extremes. But it should be noted that not only are humans born with their sexuality skewed away from the opposite sex and toward the same sex it's also true that humans are born physically inter-sexed. Mistakes are made in reproduction and these mistakes can result in individuals that of indeterminate sex, this occurs one in 1500 births. I don't see why it's so difficult to see that people born homosexual might be the result of fetus development not going the direction it should have. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14459843 If babies are born with their sex organs physically between one sex or the other is it so difficult to believe that sexual desire cannot be affected in a similar way?

Even if you could make a case that such a weapon that targets specific groups of people was not racist it's usefulness would be limited unless you intended to kill everyone non combatants included and only if everyone you were fighting shared the same vulnerability which again would seem to indicate some sort of racial component. Despicable would seem to the best description of such a weapon, monstrous would be more accurate...

Again, vitalism was discredited more than a century ago, if they made bold assumptions with out a solid background maybe you could enlighten us as to what you mean by that? Possibly you could give us your definition of organic and inorganic substances? And a heads up on that under lying truth would be helpful as well.... As for solving life... what exactly do you mean by that? Life is not exactly mysterious, as far as I know life is a chemical reaction nothing more, if you have evidence it is more than a chemical reaction please show us your evidence of this.

Wouldn't that depend on your definition of good and bad in this context?

Hmmm, yes, Jessica Alba pretty much wins any contest... meow

Unless your war was racist in nature I can't see how this would be helpful....

We are very close on that one, Farscape runs a close third for me but Star Trek is where I want to live but being a space cowboy is very appealing too. Star Gate is pretty cool but the parasitic Goa'uld kind of ruin the idea of wanting to live there...

Many science fiction based television shows have been on over the years, some better than others but most are set in their own universe. Which ones are your favorites and if you can explain why. If you want rate them in order of most favorite to least.

What you are suggesting is or at least sounds akin to vitalism which was discredited more than a century ago. But if taken literally then the smallest particle both biology and physics has in common would be the proton... hydrogen ions are an important part of life, well life as we know it anyway...

In Star Trek Enterprise they even had a captains dog...

I believe I did give a logical disproof of the code argument in post #9. i live at the coast, I beach comb quite a bit and the waves do indeed sort out shells and bits of rock and other objects by size and shape. These sorted objects appear in distinct patterns as you walk along these patterns become evident. A case in point, at some point many years ago a huge wall was made at the ocean by dumping marl boulders on the only natural out cropping of rock on the NC coast. This created an environment where small objects were ground up by wave action and distributed along the beach. At some point a few truck loads of bricks was dumped at that same place and the ocean proceeded to grind up these bricks and distribute them along the beach as to shape and size. The distribution of these brick pieces can be charted, larger pieces appear first from the larger marl boulder wall and with smaller pieces being distributed further and further away but it is much more complex than just size distribution. They are sorted by shape as well, as you walk along various shapes of brick fragments are distributed in groups as well as by size. This occurs with fragments of everything from shells to sand grains but the bricks were especially interesting due to the shape distribution, there were areas of brick fragments shaped like spindles, spheres, various odd shapes but each shape was found with other similarly sized and shaped fragments. At on point along the beach the fragments started to tend toward a valentines day shaped heart and there in on small section was dozens of perfectly heart shaped fragments all in the same small place and then the shapes began to trend toward another random shape and so on down the beach. Now the heart shaped fragments were the result of wave action of several different types and to us seemed to be designed but in reality it was just a record of the wave action acting of brick fragments. The mind that decided the shapes were heart shaped was human, the evident sorting by shape and size was real but the idea that it had some reason was human. The patterns of fragments was regular and could be said to be a representation of the wave action, in other words a code but the idea of a code is a human idea we use to describes certain representations of things. The concept of a code is not independent of humans, no one but a human walking down that beach would have identified that small area of brick fragments as heart shaped, to say they were shaped by a higher power because we identified the shape as significant is simply not logical. To say the wave sorting of objects is a code because it represents the actions of waves is a human concept, it has no independent reality...

Eewww....