On 14/04/2011 13:16, Warp wrote:

>    Do that here, and you *will* get jailtime (up to several years). That's
> not even a hypothetical.

OK, that's scary... I didn't realise there were any countries like that.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 14/04/2011 13:16, Warp wrote:

> >    Do that here, and you *will* get jailtime (up to several years). That's
> > not even a hypothetical.

> OK, that's scary... I didn't realise there were any countries like that.

  In some aspects the judiciary system here is completely messed up.

  For example, an immigrant from Sudan, who is HIV-positive, raped a
16-year-old girl. He got a jail sentence of 2 years and 2 months.

  A finnish man posted a video on youtube where he blatantly and grossly
insulted islam, their prophet and the koran. He got a jail sentence of
2 years and 4 months (without possibility for parole).

  Good thing we have our priorities straight.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> writes:

> Neeum Zawan <fee### [at] festercom> wrote:
>> Homicides have more to do with a certain amendment than with religious
>> beliefs. 
>
>   The US is not the only western country where gun ownership is legal and
> popular. It is not the explanation.

Granted. Religion, however, is probably not even part of the explanation.

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On 4/13/2011 23:11, Warp wrote:
> I don't really even understand why they are so fixated
> about that "kind hypothesis" anyways, as if it was somehow crucial.

Because we have examples of observed evolution of new species during 
sufficiently recent history that it's scientific evidence. Hence, they can't 
say a kind is a species, because then they'd be admitting evolution actually 
happens.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 4/13/2011 23:16, Warp wrote:
> Neeum Zawan<fee### [at] festercom>  wrote:
>> Homicides have more to do with a certain amendment than with religious
>> beliefs.
>
>    The US is not the only western country where gun ownership is legal and
> popular. It is not the explanation.

I've heard it's much more likely the diversity of culture here than the 
presence of guns. Give the same number of guns to the Swiss or the Japanese, 
and you (do/would) get no problems at all.  But here we have neighbors each 
thinking the other shouldn't be allowed to be a citizen because of their 
skin color, their religious belief, etc.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 4/13/2011 23:34, Warp wrote:
>    I would even go so far as to say that the controversial thing is not
> what to do about it, but that many people actually oppose the rational
> thing to do. "We should stop polluting our environment and depleting
> natural resources." I don't even understand what rational reason there
> is to oppose that idea.

Not the idea. The implementation. It may be counter-intuitive to say "let 
some people keep polluting, because that will get them enough economic 
wealth in the short term that their population will demand cleaner air etc."

Sort of like saying "You should stop cutting down the rain forests" without 
recognizing that they're being cut down for farmland and people are starving 
who don't do this.

 > Is reducing pollution somehow a bad thing?

No. It's a question of how to reduce it. Let's say you even cut it down to 
where people are polluting only 30% as much as they are today. How many 
years until there's enough people in the world that we're making dangerous 
levels of pollution?

That's why people are arguing that each person should try to be "carbon 
neutral", when the obvious way to reduce pollution is to limit the number of 
children each person can have. You've seen how popular *that* idea is by how 
much they mock China for having done that successfully.

> if there was no climate change and everything was just and absolutely
> fine, we should *still* reduce pollution.

Well, sure, unless it means you, personally, starve, right?

>    Pollution causes harm to humans. That's a fact. The only controversial
> thing in this whole thing is the people who want to continue polluting
> the environment.

The controversy is what solution to pollution will cause less harm than the 
pollution itself. We could easily eliminate pollution by eliminating all 
vehicles and power plants, but the toll in human suffering of that approach 
outweighs the benefits.

I think there's little (honest) argument that the climate is changing, a 
little more argument over whether it's caused sufficiently by humans that 
reduction of human pollution will noticeably help (hard to measure 
definitively), and finally the most controversial is simply *what* needs to 
get done to actually fix the problem without causing undue suffering. Saying 
"put air scrubbers on your smokestacks and catalytic converters on your car 
exhaust" is one thing. Saying "shut down 80% of the power plants in your 
country and go back to 19th century technology" is something else.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On Thu, 14 Apr 2011 08:23:35 +0100, Stephen wrote:


>> It's a fairly fine distinction, I think.
>>
>>
> Not that fine IMO

How so?

Jim

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On Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:35:53 +0100, Stephen wrote:

> On 13/04/2011 9:56 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:13:33 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>
>>> On 13/04/2011 8:51 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>>> In that case they can F' off;-P
>>>> LOL
>>>
>>> That's what I meant in the first place. Go forth and multiply. :-D
>>
>> Nicely played. :P
>>
>> Jim
> 
> It wasn't game play just an old saying.

Well, yeah, but the way the progression worked was good. :)

Jim

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On Thu, 14 Apr 2011 02:28:42 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Now either those creationists are uneducated as to the multiple
>> definitions of the word 'theory' and which one actually applies when
>> one talks about the 'theory of evolution' (hint, it's not the
>> 'hypothesis of evolution' definition, which is what they push), or they
>> are deliberately misusing the word so as to push their dogmatic
>> approach to trying to make creationism seem like science.
> 
>   One big problem is that most creationists (and in fact most laymen,
> regardless of orientation) don't even understand what the theory of
> evolution is about. They attribute all kinds of misconceptions to it
> (and also deny many undeniable natural phenomena as being evolution).

That's certainly true - and a good demonstration as to why education is 
so very important.  (Of course, there are those who when it comes to 
evolution think of it not as 'education' but 'indoctrination' - oh the 
joys of having uneducated people make decisions).

>   Moreover, many ID proponents muddle the waters even more by mixing all
> kinds of natural sciences as being part of "evolution". You'll see them
> claiming that different fields of astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry,
> quantum mechanics, geology, paleontology and other fields of natural
> sciences are part of "theory of evolution", even though those have
> nothing to do with the theory, nor even with biology.

Yep.

>   Ironically, they not only vastly expand what their mythical concept of
> "evolution" covers, to include fields of science that have nothing to do
> with it, they on the other end deny natural phenomena which are part of
> evolutionary theory as being "evolution".
> 
>   I suppose this is a very typical case of building a straw man.

Many if not most of them probably haven't even read Darwin, but they 
argue against it based on what they imagine it says.

Jim

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On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:24:20 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 4/13/2011 15:31, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:18:41 +0200, andrel wrote:
>>
>>> - nobody (at least no scientist) knows 'the chemical origins of life'
>>
>> Now I didn't actually take high school biology, but I thought there had
>> been some progress made in this area
> 
> Progress, but nothing definitive like *actually* making life.

Now that you say it, yes, I think that is what I found.  But getting 
closer, certainly.

>>>   - 'global warming' is perhaps the only thing mentioned that comes
>>> close to being a controversy in the scientific field.
>>
>> And even then it's not that controversial.  It's a relatively small
>> percentage of scientists who study climate change who think climate
>> change isn't happening.
> 
> I think it's more controversial what to do about it.  And at least
> there's something that remotely *sounds* controversial about it, if you
> actually read the original source stuff.

Certainly for those who believe science stands still - and that our 
understanding hasn't changed (or should I say 'evolved'? ;) ) since 
Darwin wrote about it.

Jim

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