Warp wrote:
> Gilles Tran <gitran_nospam_@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>> There's the theory that Warp is a human being. It's based on several facts, 
>> like the one that you're a programmer and that only human beings have been 
>> found to be programmers.
> 
>> Now there's the theory that Warp is a cute little bunny with a pink nose and 
>> furry paws that pretends to be a human being. According to my theory, you're 
>> the only rabbit who knows programming. It's based on the fact that a google 
>> search on Warp+rabbit returns 600000 results. The web being the largest book 
>> known to man, it must be true (Warp+aardvark returns 100000 hits, so the 
>> probability of your being an aardvark is smaller).
> 
>> Since you don't seem to grasp the difference between theories of the first 
>> type and "theories" of the second type, I'll call you a rabbit until you can 
>> disprove my theory. And if you dare tell me I'm stupid or silly, I'll be 
>> deeply hurt, you wascally wabbit.
> 
>   You win the price for the most far-fetched and off-point analogy so far.
> 
>   Btw, why is it that every time I express my opinion that we should
> respect other people and not make fun of them nor insult them, I get
> strong opposition? This is something that always keeps puzzling me.
> 
My guess is that it is the way you express that opinion.

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> Btw, why is it that every time I express my opinion that we should 
> respect other people and not make fun of them nor insult them, I get
>  strong opposition? This is something that always keeps puzzling me.
> 

Because instead of simply expressing your opinion for what it is, you
prefer build a complex argumentation relying on rather fuzzy,
ill-defined, or downright wrong ideas, phrasing it as if you were the
sole tenant of every truth in the world, insulting quite a few people
and their convictions in the process.

Because, when people try to explain you something, you are not even
trying to understand what could be true or useful in what they are
saying, but instead seeking how they are wrong in every possible way,
generating lengthy arguments in the process, just for the apparent sake
of finally seeing someone saying that you are right. On whatever minor
irrelevant detail.

And of course every such discussion ends exactly like this, you say that
people on the Internet do not understand you, that they are seeing bad
intentions that are not there, and ultimately that you don't care about
anyone else's opinion. Yeah, because as you say it happens to you all
the time, so it must be a problem with others. Well, if this point of
view makes you feel good...

Frankly I've been reading three such discussions recently, and I can
remember several of your "duels" with Darren and others before... And
each time I'm lamenting at how you use up that much of your intelligence
struggling in lost battles you started yourself.

Not that I'm hoping you change in any way, but that is how I see things...

-- 
Vincent

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Vincent Le Chevalier <gal### [at] libertyallsurfspamfr> wrote:
> Because instead of simply expressing your opinion for what it is, you
> prefer build a complex argumentation relying on rather fuzzy,
> ill-defined, or downright wrong ideas

  Excuse me? My original objection was pretty clear and straightforward.
I opposed mocking other people because of their beliefs, and that's it.
I didn't make any claim about the veracity of any beliefs. People just
wanted to read that I was defending those beliefs although at no point
I did that. No matter how many times I repeated this, people just ignored
it and tried to drag the conversation onto the veracity of those beliefs.
No matter how I said "I'm not talking about those beliefs and wether they
are true or not" people would just not listen.

  Now you are accusing me of making complicated fuzzy argumentations?
My point was pretty simple and straightforward.

> phrasing it as if you were the
> sole tenant of every truth in the world

  If I say "you shouldn't make fun of people, you should respect people"
and get opposition, then I'm happy of being accused of thinking that
I know "every truth in the world".

>, insulting quite a few people
> and their convictions in the process.

  If objecting mockery insults someone, then so be it.

> Because, when people try to explain you something, you are not even
> trying to understand what could be true or useful in what they are
> saying, but instead seeking how they are wrong in every possible way,
> generating lengthy arguments in the process, just for the apparent sake
> of finally seeing someone saying that you are right. On whatever minor
> irrelevant detail.

  I wrote several times that I'm not opposing the theory of evolution,
that that was not my point, but people would simply not listen. They
constantly tried to defend the theory of evolution, while I was not
interested in that at all, and I made that clear many times. What else
would you have me do?

  Besides, the main point was that I said that it's not ok to mock people
and I got clear opposition to this, saying that it is ok. That kind of
opposition cannot be explained with me doing whatever you accuse me of
doing. My position was simple and clear.

> And of course every such discussion ends exactly like this, you say that
> people on the Internet do not understand you, that they are seeing bad
> intentions that are not there

  No, people in the internet read too much between the lines and simply
don't listen when someone tells them clearly and concisely that they are
completely missing the point.

> and ultimately that you don't care about
> anyone else's opinion.

  If I don't care about anyone else's opinion, why am I wondering what
could be reason for people to oppose the idea of respecting people and
not making fun of them? I can't understand the reason.

> Frankly I've been reading three such discussions recently, and I can
> remember several of your "duels" with Darren and others before... And
> each time I'm lamenting at how you use up that much of your intelligence
> struggling in lost battles you started yourself.

  It certainly seems so that if someone posts something which makes fun
of someone or some people, objecting to this mockery will result in a
flood of opposition. I still can't understand why, and your inflammatory
"answer" to the question doesn't answer it at all.

> Not that I'm hoping you change in any way, but that is how I see things...

  Thanks for not answering the question I asked.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> >   Btw, why is it that every time I express my opinion that we should
> > respect other people and not make fun of them nor insult them, I get
> > strong opposition? This is something that always keeps puzzling me.
> > 
> My guess is that it is the way you express that opinion.

  And my guess that part of the problem is that people want to read
more than there is. In this case they wanted to see me defending young
earth creationism only because I opposed page which sole purpose seemed
to be to mock some museum dedicated to that, even though I made quite
clear that I opposed only the mockery, the making fun of other people,
nothing else.

  In other cases, however, I just can't understand it. For example if
I say that we should not make fun of the head of state of another country,
people opposed me like mad. No rational explanation for that came up in
the lengthy flamewar. I still can't understand this.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   And my guess that part of the problem is that people want to read
> more than there is.

In this instance, I'll agree with Warp.

However, I'll disagree that young-earth creationist ideas deserve any 
respect at all.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> However, I'll disagree that young-earth creationist ideas deserve any 
> respect at all.

  While I admit that my posts could be interpreted as meaning that I oppose
the idea of mocking and disrespecting young-earth creationism, that's not
really what I meant.

  The photo gallery didn't directly mock any people per se, but I just got
the strong feeling that mocking the people who believe in those things was
implicitly there, more or less clearly. It mentioned how many people seemed
to visit the museum, and other similar comments.

  The article related to the photo gallery had quite a lengthy introduction
calling the entire thing "horseshit".

  When you use such strong words, you are going to insult some people.
People will feel being insulted because of their beliefs. What they believe
may be ridiculous, but that doesn't lessen the fact that calling what they
believe "horseshit", especially so verbosely as he did, is going to insult
people.

  I was not speaking pro respecting the young-earth creationism claims,
but pro respecting people, not insulting them, not making fun of them.
IMO false claims should be debunked seriously. The photo gallery had no
debunking at all. It was pure and simple mocking.

  That is what bothered me.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp escribió:
>   The photo gallery didn't directly mock any people per se, but I just got
> the strong feeling that mocking the people who believe in those things was
> implicitly there, more or less clearly.

That sounds to me like you're reading between the lines...

> No, people in the internet read too much between the lines and simply
> don't listen when someone tells them clearly and concisely that they are
> completely missing the point.

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In article <473### [at] hotmailcom>, a_l### [at] hotmailcom 
says...
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
> > In article <473dde89$1@news.povray.org>, 
> > gal### [at] libertyALLsurfSPAMfr says...

> >>>   Take any unsolved question in science, which science has yet not an
> >>> answer to, and present the theory "it happens because invisible gnome
s
> >>> do it from inside the Earth". Even if the scientist doesn't have any
> >>> alternative theory to that, it's still completely valid for him to do
ubt
> >>> that presented theory.
> >>>
> >> The doubt in this case is for a completely valid reason. A key point
 
> >> with any scientific theory is that you have to be able to challenge it
. 
> >> Your little gnomes are hard to test for empirically...
> >>
> >> So the scientist still does not have a scientific theory, in that case
.
> >>
> > Yeah. The first problem seems to be that ID people think *theory* means
 
> > "guess". It doesn't. 
> More precisely they think that 'theory' in a scientific context means 
> the same 'theory' as used in everyday practice. Possibly even more 
> precise, they think that 'theory' means what they choose it to mean, 
> neither more nor less.
> 
Want another bit of silliness:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626303.600-evolution-wars-take-
a-bizarre-twist.html

DI is claiming that this: "Q: Can you accept evolution and still believe 
in religion? A: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently anti-
religious is simply false." in a package that includes the movie about 
the Dover trial constitutes an attempt to insert religion into 
classrooms, and therefor schools could be sued for it...

So, schools can be sued for showing a documentary about a trial, in 
which the losers of the trial lost *because* they tried to interject 
their own religion into schools? Mind you, I am not sure that its 
entirely appropriate to include that statement as part of the package, 
unless its merely quoting a statement, as example, from the trial 
itself, but this is just absurd. Though not as absurd as the hate mail, 
death threats and insanely irrational letters sent into PBS by love thy 
neighbor, self proclaimed rational, not hate filled Christians. lol And 
its only *them* that are sending in the letters like that.

These people are imho, even **less** rational than Moslom extremists, 
since at least they have *some* excuse for thinking that they have been 
mistreated in some way. These people control, or at least think they do, 
large parts of the country, but if you so much as mildly suggest that 
they possibly don't have the right to make you waste a minute letting 
them, for example, pray before a class, they start screaming that you 
are the spawn of the devil, trying to undermine their faith, and might 
even be an atheist, or worse (and this I find absurdly funny), a 
liberal.

One person just described the logic of one such person they ran into 
though. They didn't like evolution, not because they understood it, but 
because they ***literally*** thought that the charts in some books where 
real, and the way you got from a fish to a human was that one day a fish 
decided to be human, and in some sort of time lapse accelerated style 
mutations, went through every stage in between the two, in one single 
organism, leaving you with a human that **used to be** a fish five 
minutes earlier. It certainly explains the nuts that keep whining about 
how we never see dogs giving birth to elephants I guess, and similar BS.

The other silly one is the argument about how there wouldn't be monkeys 
if they all evolved into humans. A logical idiocy right up there with 
suggesting that if three people went to the beach the entire human race 
would wake up with a sun tan the next morning.

Its just mind boggling the level of either ignorance, stupidity, or both 
some of these literalists and far right wingers think evolution says, or 
reality looks like. And the fact that they are, according to a new study 
I just saw, like 1% of all Christians, and thus like 2 billion plus 
people disagree with them, not to mention all but like 0.0001% of 
biologists, ecologists, (insert an ist here that deals with biology, 
instead of something like physics), doesn't seem to clue them in at all. 
Some times I read the stuff and wonder how we as a species managed to 
get past the stage of stuffing twigs into holes to fish out ants and 
termites.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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In article <473fc549@news.povray.org>, war### [at] tagpovrayorg says...
> andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> > The physiology is so mind boggling similar that the only explanation is
 
> > a common descent.
> 
>   "I can't think of any other explanation" is no proof. Really strong
> evidence yes, but no proof.
> 
Congratulations, you just described why we consider ***every*** 
scientific theory ever devised to be the best explanation for the data. 
Now, if you could just get past that and recognize that there are a huge 
number of theories that you are not complaining about which have similar 
"gaps" and are actually "less" well understood and/or explained than 
evolution, we might get some place useful.

And just to be clear, its not just huge similarity, its huge similarity 
with, in some cases, identical genes. This doesn't make sense without 
common descent, because in many cases a gene that does X in a whole mass 
of species like apes is **not** identical in birds, and yet, you can 
place the human gene into the bird, or the bird gene into a human (well, 
and chimp or the like, since doing it to a human wouldn't be ethical), 
and they would still work. This means that the two genes where **once** 
the same, and the mechanisms they interact with are common to both, but 
that they differ due to which branch of the tree they are in. Now, you 
might try to argue that this would make sense, since they exist in 
morphologically similar species. You would be right, if the genes in 
question had anything **at all** to do with morphology. Its even more 
absurd an argument when you find it in species that are known to be 
related via those genes, but which are not at all similar to each other, 
like say a crocodile and an emu, or something. Why would they both share 
a common gene? And even worse when you can trace the steps that the 
genes went through to get from one form to the other, or from an earlier 
form to both of the new ones.

All the evidence points in one direction and one direction only, so the 
only thing the people that question it have is complaints about stuff 
they don't understand in the first place, or assertions that its all 
some coincidence. Until/unless some evidence shows up that starts to 
suggest the later though, like entire sets of genes showing up in two 
completely different species, with no possible means they could have 
both derived them from an earlier common version, or two identical sets 
(rather than single genes, which sometimes can show up in two dissimilar 
species), with no common ancestor that "could" have shared them, its 
going to continue to point in only one direction. And by entire sets, I 
mean like finding dogs that inexplicably starts growing feathers, which 
have a great number of changes in the coding for them from hair, and no 
virus or other mechanism that contains the same genes, can infect both 
birds and dogs, and can reasonably explain the sudden appearance of the 
trait.

Put simply, when every change you find is the equivalent of a lot of 
tiny single letter on a page, and you don't see entire paragraphs or 
chapters appearing out of no place, and you "do" see the same single 
letter changes in all closely similar species, its kind of hard to argue 
that the only explanation is that something came along and changed 
"huge" numbers of genes to get the results. Case in point, it was once 
thought that chimps and humans where only 90% similar genetically, then 
they changed that to 98%, they now think its closer to 99%, and 
virtually ****every single**** difference they have found that counts is 
nothing but developmental changes. I.e., when certain genes turn off and 
on. There are some differences, like a single chemical change to one 
gene that exists in ***every species*** from birds, to reptiles, to 
mammals, etc. There are only a handful of species that have this tiny 
mutation. One is humans, while most of the others are parrots. What does 
it code for? They suspect, since it changes the development of neural 
pathway development for sounds, it codes for something humans and 
parrots have in common, and all others, including chimps, lack, the 
capacity to use symbolic logic. Parrots can do it, chimps can't, which 
is why chimps can learn what words "mean", but have no capacity to 
invent new ones, while parrots have shown the ability to take existing 
words and combine them into new ones, which describe new things that 
they never encountered before.

And again, its a change or *one single* chemical, not some huge chain of 
things, like needed to grow a fin instead of a hand.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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Are you *still* thinking Warp was arguing against evolution?

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