WIP

I got the impression that the post opener was from a Muslim-basher who is just complaining that the atheist signs are attacking the religion over here, instead of attacking the one over there.....that rightwingers have turned into the new red menace. There are other POV's however! Sky pixie is a pejorative to someone who considers belief in God foundational to how they deal with life and the world around them.

The problem with this kind of talk...whether its believers who insist everyone needs their salvation, or atheists who want to free everyone of delusions, is that they are based on an unwillingness to respect the experiences of people who have different ways of finding meaning and purpose in their lives. I don't see or feel God personally, but I believe that there are many people who do, and find comfort and reassurance in believing in God. I'm not one who believes that there is something more than the life we get, because the mind is not something that can exist without a physical body anyway. The conscious mind is a creation of the brain to organize responses to whatever the world throws at us. Our sense of ego is an illusion, but a necessary illusion none the less. Fear of death and desire for immortality emerges from a physical living system that is hardwired for self-preservation. Some religious traditions have developed to take the ego at face value, and treat it as something that has its own existence independent of the body. But there are a few religious traditions that have somehow developed an insight into the true nature of ego, and that we are better served by coming to terms with its illusory nature, than wishing that we can find some way to cheat death and have immortality.

Now, it's starting to make sense!

Well, it's not! Liberals are tolerated because few challenge or question the corporate power structure that runs international banking and corporate ownership that is powerful enough to ignore the laws of most nation-states. And when it comes to "liberal" media, they are almost unanimous in their desire to work within the system; they just want to make a few tweaks and adjustments to allow more money to trickle down to the middle class and the poor. Real socialists from back in the day when they were taken seriously and feared by the business class, were calling for outright government takeover of banks and major industries, or demanding some version of Tom Hayden's plan for economic democracy, and reducing the power of shareholders over how large corporations are run. Whether you agree or disagree is beside the point; what the right defines as socialism today is any talk of sharing the wealth or restricting the rights of corporations to use their money as free speech and determine public policy. No! There has been a false narrative promulgated all over the mainstream media that Obama 'needs to move the center' following mid-term election losses. The real story is that the economic power of large corporations, which includes the business of defense, will not allow much deviation from their goals. The media, which is owned by companies with vested interests in maintaining the status quo, told their lackies on the Sunday news shows and elsewhere to bring on all of these stupid pundits who keep repeating that centrist malarky. For example, if you want to see that money has more power than the interests of the majority of Americans, you need look no further than the healthcare debate. From the way they tell it today, Obama has brought in government control of the health insurance industry. Well, these modest curbs have to be understood in light that the government has increased the size of their client list, while not demanding that they offer insurance without pre-existing conditions. This is obviously a system that if anything, is Plan B of the insurance industry, since it leaves them enriched and still in control of the system. Obamacare is almost identical to what Mitt Romney brought in for residents of Massachussets, and what Bob Dole and Hillary Clinton had proposed back in the 90's. During the runup to the final vote, the Obama Administration kept dropping hints of a "public option" or allowing private citizens to buy in to Medicare, rather than a private insurer. In poll after poll, this was the most popular option to the majority of voters...but what did they get from their elected representatives? They got what the insurance companies wanted, not what the majority of voters wanted; because the insurance companies money was more important than the desires of the majority of the people. Now, if this is what you, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin etc. call socialism, then a new word has to be created for real socialism that would strip the wealthiest one percent of their control of the system. Oh yeah! You think that the dog whistle appeals to rightwing racism aren't noticed by others? McCain and Palin tried to drop as many hints as possible during the campaign without coming right out and saying it....he's not one of us etc. When McCain and Palin were talking about the "real" America, as they toured white rural and suburban neighbourhoods, some of us figured out the message! The fact that an overtly racist right wing exists on the fringes of the mainstream movement also cannot be ignored. Neocons never were left! They were Democrat defense hawks back in the 60's who turned Republican because the Democratic Party turned against the Vietnam War, and became more pacifist. I know that the larger and more centralized a system is, the more inclined it will be to be corrupt and inefficient. My turn to the left is not because I'm enthused about socialism, it's because capitalism has been a disaster, and offers no clear path to live sustainably at a time when we are running out of resources and facing an ecological disaster. The power of money is keeping major policy the same, whether an administration is Democratic or Republican. Over the last 100 years in the United States, successive court decisions have expanded the rights of artificial corporate citizens at the expense of real people. Over the last 30 odd years, manufacturing in the U.S. went from one third of GDP to about 15%, while banking and insurance went in the other direction, becoming over a third of the U.S. economy before the banking disaster. The bailout did not extract any painful concessions from institutions that were crying for help, and the reforms since then have left them back in charge and still chasing short-term risk. Another crash is only a matter of time. Once again, the people with the money and the lobbyists in Washington have shown that they really run the system regardless of what government the people get to vote for.

Are you telling me that they have principles?

So, a 25 year old Dire Straits song serves as the rallying point for conservative phony outrage! Isn't one thread enough? I'm a Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler fan, but maybe it's because I always hated "Money For Nothing" I couldn't care less whether or not someone thinks it needs to be censored now. So, let's add the latest conservative phony outrage point on the pile - Huck Finn. Are conservatives just trying to shift attention from the violence they are spawning with their outrageous rhetoric? Conservatives who don't bat an eyelash at censorship of information by the government or the military, and attempts to shut down whistleblowers, are going to plant their flag on the right to offend gays and blacks....I think that fact tells us all we need to know about conservative ethics and morality!

Pot, meet kettle! Then you explain what you mean by telling a female member that you can satisfy her better than her husband or boyfriend! Nevermind, that your personal rambling never has anything to do with the topic. When I first commented on your post, I said you were bragging about your sexual prowess...but you even objected to that, so I had to put in terms that you understand in the followup. And, you already know that my comment was regarding the previous statement, not this one which I didn't even quote; and I have no interest in looking up to see how old you or Kimmy are. So don't try to act like this was the one I was responding to. Then you need to do something about your ego. Those of us who are sane and rational, don't think that we are God's gift to women. Maybe some guys can get away with acting like this when they're young, but don't cry about the hand life has dealt you if you're heading into middle age thinking this way. No, my irritation is with you trying to turn every thread into a discussion about you and your problems. If you were actually talking about atheism, I would either address your claims, or ignore them if they didn't make any sense. And you think everyone thinks the same way you do, otherwise you wouldn't be trying to tell everyone what their motivations are. Fundamentalists cannot accept the concept of no god being possible, so they predetermine that atheists are either afraid of being confronted by God, or are angry with God; the fact is that some of us started thinking that maybe the reason why God seems hidden and hard to find, or prove exists, is because there is no such thing in the first place, and we have to accept the world the way it is. And, you should be aware that alot, probably most believers do not view God as "cold and distant." This doesn't sound like a very healthy approach for someone who claims to be a believer. What good does believing in this kind of God do for you?

A need to explain the unknown is built in to our way of thinking. In early childhood, kids use a teleological approach to explain the world around them. In other words, everything has a purpose, and early on, that purpose is always for a reason connected to them....the Sun shines so they can play outside, go to the beach etc. A good example is found in this little essay: Why Are Rocks Pointy? It's not hard to see how teleological thinking leads to myth-making, but even though most of us start taking a little more analytical approach to gathering knowledge later in life, teleological thinking and essentialism (an inbuilt predisposition to believe in essential, possibly supernatural properties) is always lurking in the background of even the most rational Dawkins fan. The psychology experiment based on the question: Would You Wear a Killer's Cardigan is a good test to demonstrate how most people have a reflexive irrational fear of an item that might belong to some evil person. Now, if we have so much intuitive thinking that is not rational or reason-based, how do the theorists like Daniel Dennet -- who view religion as an adaptive behaviour that can be unlearned -- really expect religion or supernatural thinking to disappear among the majority of the population?

I've heard Chris Hedges say that MSM will tolerate liberals who work within the system...like Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow, John Stewart etc.; but if a liberal or someone further left criticizes the existing power structure itself, then they are blacklisted to the blogosphere, whether they are renowned intellectuals, or experienced journalists. And I should mention that I'm talking specifically about American media; you'll still see Hedges and Chomsky show up on a TVO lecture or get an interview on one of the CBC shows, but in America, they don't even get a call from so-called public television and radio, largely because "public" in the U.S. means primarily funded by large corporate trust funds. I thought of this statement after watching Michael Moore's documentary on the banks and international capitalism when it was played on cable TV. Moore doesn't get many opportunities to promote his movies these days; and recalled that when he did a promotional spot on Bill Maher's show, and was asked 'what do you suggest we do to fix the situation -- he blanked -- he didn't offer any solutions. This is a guy who has no shortage of opinions otherwise, and of course he's not someone who's going to come up with a better economic system; but I had to wonder if he held back because he knew that he wouldn't get on TV anywhere if he called for nationalizing the banks and dismantling global capitalism. I think Hitchens's embrace of Neoconservatism grew out of the same source as his rational atheist ideology. In his books and columns he drops quotes from just about everything written in the English language in the last 400 years....but it's all Eurocentric culture, which is steeped in the notion of separation of materialism and supernaturalism. The enlightened religious minds like Descartes and Kant, made a sharp distinction between reason and emotion, and between body and mind. The only difference between the Christian materialists and the atheist materialists, is that the latter doesn't accept the concept of God or any supernatural forces; but both sides agree that reason is separate from emotion (these guys should be reading some modern books on neuroscience!) and on Western methods of secular government, which they believe should be adopted or even imposed on the rest of the world. As for different cultures with different views of governing society....well, sad day for them! If they have lots of oil, they can expect regime change for their own benefit. The only difference I can see in the religious Neocons and the atheist Neocons is one group harbours fantasies about imposing Christianity on them, and the other thinks they are going to free them from religion.

So, you also agree with him when he's talking about religion?

It doesn't really matter, because carbon dioxide from a volcano will have a different isotopic signature than carbon coming from fossil fuels. The atmospheric carbon isotopic composition is changing, and this change matches the isotopic signature that would be expected if the increase in atmospheric CO2 was due to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

I've heard Camille Paglia, and I don't get how her arguments make sense, even to her. I don't know who she is trying to impress, but there are some people who think they are so original and above the crowd, that they need to shock their associates by going against them. Her arguments about Iraq and U.S. foreign policy are as empty as Christopher Hitchens, who similarly seems to like to just piss everybody off, and see if he can argue the most odious and indefensible positions. Glenn Greenwald has become one of my favourites of late. Largely because his hard line for civil liberties pretty much got him bounced off of the mainstream press. Similar to Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Robert Scheer, I give more weight to personalities that have taken a bullet financially in order to be true to their beliefs and principles. I don't see a whole lot of people on the right who are similarly willing to risk being ostracized and lose airtime at Foxnews etc.

More false equivalency! As Bill Maher said: "there's a difference between a madman and a maaad man.

From what I've been told, cross-dressing is not necessarily connected with being gay. It may have grown out of some fixation a guy had with his mother or older sister in early childhood, and some guys who are married and have families, secretly dress up like women to indulge this fantasy later in life. As for how men are supposed to act, it seems that sexual orientation is determined by a number of different factors that can include genetics and hormones. It seems to be pretty well established (as far as men are concerned...female sexuality seems to be more difficult to study and gets less attention) that if a man is going to turn out gay, there will be evidence for it long before puberty. For men, we have to deal with whatever sexual orientation we feel -- we don't get to choose it, and that's why crap like fundamentalist programs to try to turn gay kids straight, really need to be stopped before they do any more damage to young people.

So, how did that end up with bragging about your cock, and saying that you could satisfy her better than her husband or boyfriend etc.. That does not sound like love to me, or respect for women for that matter; it sounds like the only way you can deal with women is for sexual purposes. And I don't share my personal information online. I quit Facebook for this reason. But, even anonymously, there are some things that should be discussed privately, rather than blabbed for everyone else who can't get away, to have to put up with. You mean that when you're talking to guys, you brag about the size of your cock too? You weren't having a private conversation in case you're not aware -- you posted right here for all to see, so don't go making some bullshit argument about violating your privacy. You could have sent an IM or an email or something, if you were having a private chat. Thanks for noticing that the thread topic was atheists!

Well, since I am of his ilk, there is a reason why we can't accept an argument that AGW is a debate point...because it isn't. You can argue about how to deal with the effects of global warming (this is the direction most of your skeptic sources are going in now) but the basic science is not subject to debate. For example, this point about evidence from carbon chemistry has probably been posted a zillion times so far, but here we go again: How does this help in determining the source of CO2 increase? The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in atmospheric CO2 is larger than the ratio in fossil fuel. If atmospheric CO2 is increasing due to burning fossil fuels, then the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 should be decreasing. And that is exactly what is happening. In the graph below (Figure 2.3( in Chapter 2 [PDF] of the IPCC report), the black line shows increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the red line shows the decreasing ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12. (The red scale is reversed, so the line goes up as the ratio declines.) http://green.yahoo.com/blog/climate411/134/how-we-know-humans-cause-global-warming-part-2-of-5-chemistry.html

I used to be pretty far to the right, especially about world affairs; but, I got sick of being lied to. I know these sources and their basic arguments....they haven't added anything new in recent years; the only difference is that the right was feeling comfortable and confident when Dubya became president in 2000. By the time he ran for re-election, conservatives and libertarians were starting to realize that things weren't working out the way they were supposed to; but rather than step back and re-evaluate their positions, they went even more gonzo and hostile to all criticism. Most of the conservative talk-radio hosts (except for Michael Savage) could have civil conversations with their liberal adversaries until about five years ago, when they all headed for their bunkers.

Reminds me of back in the 70's, before a good understanding was available of the environment -- one of the U.S. gov. depts. was actually funding a pilot project to test the feasibility of breaking up pack ice in the Antarctic, and towing them to the Persian Gulf to sell to all of the nouveau riche emirates; I can imagine what a mess we would have if they actually followed through with it. They don't mention anything about costs! This highrise, high tech farm looks like it would be expensive to build and to operate. I'm a little dubious about an "almost" closed system, after reading about the failures of the Biosphere 2 experiments back in the 80's. Back then, even the scientists didn't realize how complex ecological systems were; the books I had back in the 70's about long distance space ships and space colonies, had closed farming systems that were supposed to provide the necessities -- Biosphere 2 threw a big monkeywrench into these plans, because so many problems with rising carbon dioxide levels, mold, and dry rot, could not be solved. But, if an almost closed agricultural system is possible, and is able to comfortably meet the needs of 7 billion people, then what? Will it prevent our looming disaster, or just provide a stopgap solution like the Green Revolution, and leave us with an even larger population problem to deal with?

Do they at least get to lie down, or do they have to remain at attention? Seriously, it's not a matter of how many people you can fit into a given space; it's a question of how many people can live without depleting all of the resources....and needless to say, 7 billion people would not survive for very long in Texas, if they had no access to outside resources. At some point, if the human race is going to last more than 50 or a hundred years, this mentality that nature is here for our exploitation will have to end! The cold hard facts that the planet's ecosystems are giving us a rude awakening to right now, is that every animal, including the human race, lives within nature, not outside of it and consuming it! This should be a simple fact, but it is lost on the masses who live in cities, or even on farms where they think they are in control of nature. Some anthropologists argue that we've been heading down this dangerous road of feeling separate from, and superior to nature ever since the agricultural revolution got started. One thing I do know is that the few hunter/gatherer tribes that may or may not still exist today have no misconceptions about how much they are in control of their environment. Do we really need to go through this again? There has been enough information posted here over the last couple of pages to show that India's Green Revolution is going to hit the wall soon, because of topsoil erosion from over-farming, and declining groundwater levels. The scientists who created the Green Revolution hybrids back in the 60's, recognized that India was already overpopulated at that time. They considered providing a boost to farm yields as a means to allow India to gradually get their population under control -- not to be a method for ballooning the population to over a billion. As mentioned elsewhere, fear would be a good motivator if there is a real cause for fear, instead of the constant barrage of phony outrage that your rightwing heroes keep subjecting their audiences to.

This is a issue that has real cause to be alarmist. That's why we have smoke detectors in our homes; to warn us of REAL danger, and I mean REAL...not the fake, phony outrage that your rightwing sources keep ginning up to scapegoat: liberals, environmentalists, secular humanists, gays, all racial minorities with darker than white skin, Muslims....and likely more that I can't think of right now. A scapegoat is targeted by neofascists like Glenn Beck to strike fear into his feeble-minded authoritarian audience, and they soak it up....some even going so far as to be in a hurry to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights! Besides all that we have covered about rising carbon levels, global warming, topsoil erosion, declining freshwater sources, overpopulation etc., the right still chooses to close their eyes and plug their ears as disaster approaches. I should say a disaster we are already in the middle of, whether we know it or not, since biologists and zoologists consider the rate of species extinction today to be equivalent to the five major mass extinctions in Earth's past: The sixth extinction Somewhere on Earth, every 20 minutes, one animal species dies out. At this rate, we will lose 50% of all species by the end of the century. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/30/opinion/la-oe-corwin30-2009nov30 Now, in this case the threat is real, and can be seen by everyone who doesn't have their eyes closed....such as all of the rightwingers who fear that real action to reduce carbon footprints and bring fossil fuel-usage to an end, will require binding international agreements, and threaten the present economic system of gangster capitalism....so be it

That article illustrates why I think that some of the so-called skeptics are malicious actors, rather than deluded or single-minded etc. Forget about all of the examples that can be cited of Lindzen shifting the goalposts and changing his arguments over the years, nowhere in that piece can I find one word: EXTINCTION. And mass extinction of animal species has been a large factor in every example of the past where we find alligators living in the Arctic. Civilization as we know it is not going to survive a period where the Earth has no polar ice caps, so just because it has happened in the past, and some species survived to retake the Earth, does not mean that this is something that future generations are going to survive; and I think people like Lindzen know this already. There does seem to be a strategy looming from the way the climate change issue is being dealt with by the U.S. and other advanced nations, that since the worst effects are going to be felt in over-populated regions of the Third World, where temperatures are high and agriculture is already perilously close to collapse, that it's okay to just write them off and see if we can save a remnant of the Earth's population. Guys like Lindzen know too much to carelessly talk about past climate variations as if its okay; or to ignore the fact that rising CO2 levels have other catastrophic effects besides trapping the Sun's energy, like increasing ocean acidification for example.

I appreciated Harris for some things, like lowering taxes; they had been drifting too high after successive increases by Tory, Liberal and finally an NDP Government. His Cabinet was abysmal; but that could largely be blamed on the fact that most of the experienced Provincial MPP's lost hope in being part of a governing majority again, and went on to other things. And, I just want to briefly mention, since the subject of why the unions would allow Bob Rae's NDP Government to collapse and be replaced by Mike Harris, you have to consider the demoralizing effect that Rae's "Social Contract" had on the large part of the NDP that are members of the public service unions. And, for the only period of my voting life, I was a member and even worked for them when Harris first ran, and also when he was re-elected....mainly because a friend of mine ran for MPP down in Niagara Falls (where I was living at the time). Now, if you're wondering why your beloved Conservatives have turned "pink" as you would call it, and moving away from Harris's libertarianism and started copying the American right's strategy of co-opting the fundamentalists -- it's because libertarians, and fiscal conservatives who pay little attention to social policy issues, do not sign up on mass to work the phones, hammer in lawn signs, or drive people to the polls on election day. When Harris won re-election, we knew that Niagara Falls would stay P.C., even though it has a history of voting Liberal; but if you took a drive around the city, you would have thought the election was between the Libs and the NDP, because you could hardly find a blue sign anywhere. We had to ask a lot of people who wanted a Bart Maves lawn sign if they could come down to the campaign office to pick them up, because we were so far behind getting signs up. And even though Maves was easily re-elected, the message was clear -- the P.C.'s did not have an activist grassroots base equivalent to the NDP or the Liberals which is necessary to win close elections..... and that's probably a big reason why Harris decided not to run for a third term when he was falling behind in the polls....and it's also why the present day Conservatives are going after the God vote, and following the Republican strategy of getting all of the church people to work at the grassroots level running the campaigns.

Thanks, I appreciate that. Maybe the forum administrators will add something like that in the future. But, I got to say, that too many of these little popularity and ranking add-ons can be deceptive, since the largest clique within the forum will try to control the debate.

You'll get more warm weather than you can handle after all of ice up north has finally melted.

I may have a wrong impression, but the stories about Orthodox leaders demanding women be removed from, or given segregated seating in theaters, or women wearing miniskirts being physically assaulted by Orthodox men on buses or on city streets in Jerusalem, gives an outsider the impression that this place is going to look like Iran or Saudi Arabia in a few years. The government will really have to do something about the exemption from military service sometime though. I'm surprised all of the people who have been drafted into military service during their youth are willing to put up with free riders. Isn't there an inevitable conflict between having an open democratic society, and a nation for one ethnic group and religion? Before the Six Day War, when Arabs only made up 10% of the population, it may have been possible to do both; but when Arab Israelis grow too large in number, it's not possible to have a Jewish state, and a democratic state at the same time.