Just stop the useless complaining.
POSTED BY: LostInTheVerse
UPDATED: Thursday, November 25, 2004 04:27
VIEWED: 24069
PAGE 8 of 17
Quote:
Originally posted by LostInTheVerse:
Quit your bitching and do something about it.
To be on topic for a moment, I'd like to ask you some questions.
If GW didn't listen to all the protests, those being the largest since Vietnam and the largest world wide coordinated protests ever, what makes you thinkg he'll listen to smaller ones? I mean, I saw him in an interview say, (paraphrase) "Listening to these protesters would be like making laws based on opinion polls. I'm not going to do that!"
So, since protesting didn't/won't work, voting didn't work, what would you have them do?
And seriously man, it's day 2 after the elections. I think that it'll take a little longer than a day do release this. Get some patience man! Not to mention that these threads are clearly marked. Stay away from them if they bother you so much!
I'd agree with you if this lasted for weeks but 2 days? Please
----
"Canada being mad at you is like Mr. Rogers throwing a brick through your window." -Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
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Quote:
Originally posted by danfan:
Pete,
I love the way you think. Thanks for keeping the focus on the important stuff. I feel the need to comment on one thing you said:
"And yes, I think the US is mired in one of its darkest days..."
i know many think this is "one of the darkest times" or "the darkest time" or "the dawn of a fascist state." These comments are cropping up all over the place. They seem like hyperbole to me. One could argue that this is or isn't a "bad" time. But darkest?
In the 1860's, this nation turned on itself like a savage dog and tried to tear itself apart. Them's DARKEST days. And before anyone says that's what's happening now, park the hyperbole and remember: we've yet to see thousands of citizens (often family members on both sides) firing guns at each other and leaving bodies in the field for weeks on end.
Then for nearly a generation after that war was "Reconstruction" (which was far from what it claimed to be) and the aftermath. Very bitter time indeed.
Then, closer to now, shortly after Pearl Harbor, my mother watched all four of her brothers go off to fight a war for the survival of our nation... a war that we were LOSING at the time. Neighbors were getting their family members back home in bags and boxes. When she talks of that time, she still chokes up... and she's one of the strongest woman I've ever known.
So... scary? Dark? Maybe. Darkest? I disagree. I believe we need more perpective than that.
Point, Danfan.
It's a bit too easy to slip into hyperbole, isn't it? Affairs in the US could be worse, right now. And political corruption and vote fiving was rife in the 19th century here in the UK and in the US, so times have been far worse in that respect as well.
So I'll say that life has never been more secure for her people, and healthy - whilst sternly adding in a stoic Seneca sort of way that she's never been more disliked by the rest of the world, and that her culture is in danger of being debased and her society polarised between the very rich and the poor.
But darkest of days? Tch! Shouldn't have said that. The US civil war WAS darker.
(By the by, do you know what the most costly war in British history was? Our civil war of the 16th century! Historians and scientists have made new findings that due to rampant political murders, countless massacres and skirmishes and famine bought on by food supply disruption that ONE IN FOUR people in Britian died during the war!)
Pete
P.S: Cheers for the compliment!
"If you can keep your head whilst others... eurgh! Ack! I've spilt my ink! Ugh! Ink on my trousers! Agh! Ink on my shirt! My only hope! The window! Aieeeeee!" (Falls to death)
- Jonathan Nash
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Here is what I have learned from reading all these posts to this thread this morning:
1) NervousPete is funny. And I think I'm interested in this rumored "terrorist custard pie". Does that use real terrorists, or can you substitute imitation?
2) Discussions comparing the legitimacy of science vs. religion hurts my head. But maybe that's because I made straight C's in science and get most of my scientific information from watching life grow in my refrigerator.
3) A lot of people think I should shut up and die. That hurts my feelings and makes me cry inside.
4) Apparently George W. is one of the four horsemen. This is most disconcerting.
5) I clearly don't have enough work to do at my desk today.
"Dear diary, today I was pompous and my sister was crazy."
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SigmaNunki: I read the threads b/c I like talking politics and I'm always hopeful to find a nice thread here. We're all smart people and it pains me that people can be so closed minded about all of this. Just because I vote bush does not make me a congenital idiot. That's the point of this thread. The useless bitching I speak of has been going on for 2 years. I think I gave plenty of time.
And voting did work. Apparently the majority of the American people agree with him, at least the majority of those who care enough to actually vote. 4 million is not a small number. And the republican party took both houses of congress. That's the scariest part for me, but it's a clear indicator that the politically active sect of the country wants republican leadership right now. I'm sorry if you disagree, but that's what the numbers show. If the protests were large enough he would have been voted out of office.
Case in point: the number I keep seeing is only 17% of new eligible voters (who historically vote overwhelmingly democrat). If young people had cared enough to stop their bitching and go vote, there would be a new President Elect.
I hope this answers your questions, I'm going to go back to fearing a 1 party legislature. Happy flying 
~ Lost In The 'Verse
"About a year before we met, I spent 6 months on a moon where the primary form of recreation was juggling geese. My hand to god. Baby geese. Goslings. They were juggled!"
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
There are two big problems in ther United States that prevent rational discussion, one that most other devloped nations don't have and can't possibly comprehend from a distance.
In the past four years, there have been major scandals in the Bush administration and Republican policy - the energy trading deregulation that gave us Enron,...
I knew something in this post was bothering me, and finally figured it out. It's laying the blame for Enron on the Bush administration. Enron's egregious behavior, including cheating on their taxes, began in the mid to late '90s. The SEC started investigating Enron in Oct. 2001, 10 months into the Bush presidency, and the Justice Department began a criminal investigation in Jan. 2002. Also in 2002 The Justice Dept took down the Arthur Anderson accounting firm for obstruction of justice in the destruction of tons of Enron records. A whole slew of Enron execs have since pled guilty or been convicted of various crimes. Energy deregulation the Bushies may have done, but Enron belongs to an earlier administration.
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/01/enron/timeline.html
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Thank you, Maugwai, for adding some levity here . Welcome to the ranks of us with too much time on our hands.
~ Lost In The 'Verse
"About a year before we met, I spent 6 months on a moon where the primary form of recreation was juggling geese. My hand to god. Baby geese. Goslings. They were juggled!"
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I sure am late to this thread...
To the left, I say:
Who have you convinced of something today?
The day is early for me, but I honestly believe I changed 2 minds yesterday while at work over the border in Indiana about Gay Marriage. I sat at lunch with them listened to what they thought about it and explained to them why I felt that nothing they felt about marriage was harmed by gay marriage. By the end of the conversation, all 3 of us sat in agreement on 3 things.
1. Maybe gays being married wasn't harmful to their marriages.
2. The right used the word "marriage" as the real lever to drive the entire thing and that the semantics of the whole thing were just silly.
3. A large portion of the left didn't really seem to care about gays being married, they seemed more inclined to want to point at "moronic religious people" that fought gay marriage. So the gays were just a tool towards being able to spew more bile.
I say these things not because I care what your views are or because I look towards others that support gay marriage to agree with those 3 points. I simply bring this up because I suspect that many people here have such a mindset that they would not be capable of having such a conversation with "moronic religious people".
So, I ask again, whose mind did YOU change yesterday?
Cheers,
Gruesome
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I also included Republican policies as part of the problem. If you were to look up the history of energy trading deregulation that was behind Enron, you would see what I mean. Look it up yourself. Perhaps if you had to find this info on your own you would vaue it more instead of just quibbling.
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I think there in lies the problem. You are classically trained as a scientists with a particular way of deducing and reducing a problem in a particular way - using logic and properties and laws. Using facts and procedures to proof and disprove. To an anthropologist, religion is not simply worshipping, praying and taking ideas on irrationally. It is the practice on internalizing a system of believes that rationalizes your world. In this way, the religions of the world provides a roadmap for people to understand how things work and why things work around them. Each religion has their own stories of beginnings and why people became such. The faith part goes along with it that you learn to understand (and take it as "fact") the original set of precepts of the origins of the world and various other pieces of irreducible concepts. Then you build your "proofs" from that.
Science, in its own way, allows you to do the same. It's has rules that are build on irreducible concepts that one uses to build theories and proofs. These things are then used to rationalize the world around us. The thing is, science doesn't represent reality or truth. Science merely provides us with models to understand how nature and the universe works to the best approximation of how we could understand it at this very moment. Let me take this a step back, back when "Science" was at its infancy and people have a very rudimentary understanding of astronomy - and the understanding was that the earth was flat.
"Earth is flat". That was the "scientific" understanding and the model of the world back then. Everything still worked within that model. Fires burned, the Sun rose and set, the stars came and went. People lived and died. Now, we spin the clock forward a bit when this understanding and the model changed.
"Earth is round". Now we have a different set of understandings and a completely and radically different model of the world. However! Everything still worked exactly the same as before. The world and the reality didn't change around us when that model changed. The truth is still out there. The only thing that has changed is our understanding, our made up set of rules. Reality is still exactly the same as before. But we now have a different way of explaining it than before.
To an anthropologist, that is a very significant event. It's a people changing their world story. Now, as a sideline. Today's scientists have a huge problem. All of these discoveries and new theories on the nature and world around us are being uncovered at a quicker rate than ever before. But we have fewer and fewer people (as a comparison to the larger population, not meant that people are dying off rapidly) who can understand all of these things. People just aren't as versed in basic science anymore because it's not being taught well in schools, lack of interest, and the field is just really really wide spread for anyone to gain a good generalized understanding and to keep pace. This affects us in at least two levels. As a society, if you want to change the world story, you've to get the word out there and get some sort of rudimentary understanding - it's not happening (I've seen the latest PR efforts, it's pretty insulting the way it's "dumbed down"). That in effect, affects funding for further research. If people don't understand and don't believe in what you are doing, then the money isn't going to come. And that's a shame.
Now I want to preface this next small part by first saying that I am not arguing about your beliefs, I am just stating an observation.
When you say that "religious" people aren't intelligent, that's a big insult. I am not religious at all myself, but I understand it (no, I can't recite every chapter and verse of the Bible or the Koran. But that's not what I mean) and I also have many friends who are scientists but religious at the same time. No, I mean seriously scientists and seriously religious. They are physicists who work in the academia researching new physical phenomena and they go to bibl
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