825 Forum Posts by "Draconias"
At 2/24/07 11:04 PM, JakeHero wrote:At 2/24/07 11:00 PM, SevenSeize wrote: Putting faith in humanity is optimistic. The legnth of those expectations are often foolish.You'll quickly lose that optimism after reading Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
If you read the works of the insane and then become insane, does that mean they were right all along? No. It just means they tricked you into believing what they told you. They can be wrong.
I disagree about the claim that modern Americans only rely on an individual perspective because humans in general have always thought in this way. We profess group-support sometimes, especially in philosophical or idealistic documents such as the Constitution, but it is the natural way of life to think of things with reference to yourself.
Why should I care if the world warms? Either I or my children will suffer. Why should I care how much the rich are taxed? I may be one of them in my lifetime. Why should I care what happens to the environment? I might be poisoned or deprived because of it.
It's how the human mind works because we are individuals.
At 2/21/07 10:52 PM, MortifiedPenguins wrote: Who the fuck is teaching them this.
Every read a highschool-level US History book? It's the public schools teaching our kids.
At 2/16/07 02:38 AM, cellardoor6 wrote: Global warming IS happening. Everyone in their right mind knows it. But there is ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF, that humans are to blame. There is ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF, that if we cut emissions, that global warming will slow down or stop.
That's not technically true. According to the warming trends of the past 400,000 years, we should actually be in a slow cooling spell leading to an ice age right now. However, sometime about 10,000 years before the "rise" of civilization, this trend reversed. The planet has actually been warming since then, counter to the expected cooling trend. There is an article discussing this issue in the most recent Discover magazine.
However, this does reinforce the idea that emissions are not the root of the problem. In fact, what has probably had a greater impact is mass deforestation. This actually suggests a counter-balance for warming, the planting of many more forests, rather than the doomed emissions-cutting plan (you can reduce human impact, but never eliminate it). Forests would not only help the problem, but drastically reduce erosion, are self-sustaining, are pleasing to the populace (hikes, etc.), are a natural resource, and improve air quality.
Put simply, the politicians in this issue are completely off-course for how to solve the problem and they bill it in completely the wrong way. Alternatives exist, they just ignore them for the routes most likely to cripple America.
At 2/11/07 11:12 PM, packow wrote:At 2/11/07 10:46 PM, xineph wrote:I agree with your basic premise, Drac, but your reasoning is flawed.Don't try to reason with him. He'll defend his utopian ideals to the death.
I wasn't propsing a serious alternative I think anyone can implement, I was highlighting what I see as a completely absurd position, campaigning for the legalization of marijuana to slightly mitigate problems caused by marijuana. There is no justification for using it when it is illegal, and I see little justification for legalizing it that couldn't be dealt with another way.
At 2/10/07 07:21 PM, Gunter45 wrote: Actually, the Republicans around the time of Lincoln were more like the Democrats of today anyway. Political parties don't keep the same platform for that long. There was a switch along the line where the Republican and Democrat parties basically swapped platforms.
Isn't that funny, though? It was the Democrats who owned all the slaves and suppressed them, then they waffled and managed to sucker in 98% of blacks again. They sure haven't lost the touch.
At 2/10/07 06:02 PM, DAKanator wrote: Let's (innaccurately) say that 400,000 people a year buy a $20 dollar drug to releave them of cold symptoms like runny nose, scratchy throat, nausea, ect. If the company that makes these finds a cure for the common cold, then those 400,000 people only use the cure once, and that means the company is out 8 Million dollars. Buissnesses understand things in two terms, money and customers. The cure would cause both to drop. So if it was possible, releasing it would cause quite a large drop in sales, thus the company losses money.
No, see, that's not how companies operate because of a free market competition. The point of releasing a cure is to charge $100 for it and screw your competition out of the market. Sure, you lose a little bit of yearly profit, but you get a massive immediate boost, a major market gian that benefits you everywhere, and a monopoly on something that will be bought endlessly.
Put simpl,y companies think in the short term and with the goal of destroying their opponents. Releasing a cure wins in both categories.
At 2/10/07 07:44 PM, Gunter45 wrote: That is very philosphical and pretty much all I can say is that it isn't time. I've thought about time a lot and, seeing as how it's not even a universal constant, it's not possible that it's really a fundament of anything. Since time can be manipulated relatively easily (even normal velocities affect it slightly), it seems like it would be possible for something to exist even outside of time.
The most reasonable proposition about the basic nature of time that I've heard so far suggested that time is actually created through an interaction between the matter of the universe-- it's a collective property created by the basic attributes of matter. Yeah, it's a bit odd.
So, tell me, why exactly should marijuana be legalized, rather than decriminalized or ignored for other alternatives in every possible legal use? Simply because a large number of people are mentally addicted to a worthless substance?
I propose a much better solution than the legalization of marijuana that would avoid all of that annoying legislation and other issues. If everyone stopped using marijuana, the rate of arrests for it would disappear, no criminals would be funded by it, no people would suffer from laced joints, no lives would be ruined by it, and no problem would exist.
No money would be wasted on it, no one would have to worry, and there would be far fewer drugees. Now, since you're all supposedly "not addiced," why don't you just stop? It would solve everything.
At 2/9/07 04:30 PM, Tom2010 wrote: Quite frankly i don't believe that the whole adam and eva story is so kind of indacation that is how humans were made. It think it is all a story with lessons in it cuz dinosaurs were here for 64 million years and according too science we weren't around during that time so adam and eva thing i don't think, is true
Does it say humans were created first, before any other organism? Ever notice how within a few generations entire civilizations of non-Jewish surround the descendants of Adam and Eve? Maybe Genesis is the story of the origin of the God's people-- not people a whole.
Nice dead link. Too good to be true? Of course.
At 2/8/07 04:26 PM, rugbylg6 wrote: I had an idea spark into my head last night after reading some of these posts: If new cars were fitted with the ionized metal filters ,that they use in some home air filters , inside the exhaust pipe somewhere it would accually clean the air as the car drove, making thousands of air filters that drive around the country every day.
Spewing out huge amounts of ozone (smog) along the way. Great idea. How would you clean them? Deal with the wastes? How would you even supply the energy? Would it mean even worse MPG? There's more to the issue.
At 2/4/07 09:34 PM, Resist-Refuse wrote: Spending billions on weapons, to kill and destroy, when they could be spending billions on things like, ending poverty?
Poverty can not be "solved" by throwing money at it because it is caused by relative deprivation. If anyone exists in a better condition, anywhere, then the lowest on the ladder face "poverty" and grow angry. Self-sufficiency and decentralized, individual actions are necessary to deal with poverty, and self-destructive people can not be stopped from driving themselves into poverty regardless of the situation.
At 2/4/07 11:28 AM, lightning wrote:At 2/4/07 10:36 AM, Memorize wrote: Think of it this way. You have to learn 10 different names and line them up in the correct measurement. I only have to learn 4 along with 4 numbers, inch to feet, feet to yard, then yards to miles. So if you want me to show you how this is basically working, I have to remember 8 things, you have to remember a little over 10.We mostly only use millimeter, centimeter, meter and kilometer. Hey isn't that 4 names? Of course we also have other names like micrometer but in any ones normal life your never going to use it, thus not needed to know how small it is.
That's a big part of the issue, though. The Imperial system is amazing for Real Life use, and works very effectively. Sure, idiots with the brain capacity of a pea can't handle the simple conversions of "12" and "5280" but that doesn't actually matter. Regardless of your system, after 5+ years of use, an especially after 15+, you should known it innately and be able to convert with ease, thus making the conversions in Imperial irrelevant.
However, that still makes the unrealities of Metric a problem. Why do I need temperature centered at freezing and boiling when I'd die before I got halfway to boiling? Why do I need a unit of measure I can't measure out myself, without a ruler? Why do I need all these prefixes when simple, shorter names and notation work? Metric is no more exact than Imperial, and it doesn't reflect civilian life accurately, regradless of scientific applications.
At 2/4/07 10:05 AM, JudgeDredd wrote:At 2/2/07 04:49 PM, BanditByte wrote: The reason we(US) do not do much about this problem is because any bill passed by the UN would have us forgo some form of autonomy. In a democracy the people decide, not a foreign assembly.It's a pain when you have to follow a few rules, instead of making them eh!
Yeah, and the Confederates showed how pissy Americans can get if you try to force rules on them that they don't like.
Not only that, but if we give our sovereign system the finger the overall people would suffer economy due to the loss of industry.Myth-BUSTED!
Many "environmentalists" suggest solutions that don't solve the problem and work well to totall cripple our civilization. Near all are completely unreasonable and foolish because they ignore the real workings of our civilization. They are all going at the problem the wrong way, with the belief that No Humans = Good, but that's wrong.
What's needed is counter-acting effects, not just a reduction of our current effect. Leaving the forests how they are won't stop warming; but planting more forests will. That's the kind of logic and solutions we need.
What's the point of saving the world one way if you're going to doom yourself the other?You're saying we're doomed either way, so who gives a shit right?!
The choice is suffering for us and our near descendents, or potential suffering for our long-distance descendents. Which would you choose? I know what I would.
Another problem is the fact other countries still pollute even more so than we do, and yet we catch all the flak.Care to name them?
China. India. The "Third World" makes a nice clump. Those are the countries who are undergoing rapid industrialization and should be the real concern. The 500+ Chinese coal power plants currently planned for construction in the next 3 years will create more pollution in their lifetime than America has created in all of its history.
Sorry, OP, but your argument collapses almost immediately when you make claims that the child being molested could feel pleasure from the act. By definition, pedophiles target children who are not sexually mature, which means they don't have the mechanisms to enjoy sex and are incapable of properly participating. That means it is in no way possible to use it as a reward in the sense that you imagine.
Further, "rape" is by definition sex without consent. Since children are unable to give consent, any sexual act with them is rape, regardless of whether or not parents ahve th epower to put them in time-out or not. Our law says you must obtain consent; since you cannot, you shouldn't.
At 2/2/07 10:31 PM, Imperator wrote: Ever hear of the Golden Rule? And the Bible is not meant to be taken literally, you know that as well as I do, with completely refutes your argument. Just because the Bible says to stone women doesn't mean you should do it. HOWEVER, just because it says stone women, doesn't mean you can't get the meaning out of that, ie, Adultury is bad.
If the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally, then why should any part of it be taken literally, such as the 10 Commandments? Or the story of Jesus in its entirety? It's total crap to just pick and choose which parts you "believe" and which you ignore, but virtually all "believers" do so.
You know nothing about the intentions of the authors of the Bible, not whether it should be taken literally, nor if it is at all true. In effect, the hypocrisy of believers just means that they are creating their own sets of ideas and morals, just like an athiest or agnostic, but they are pulling specific "justification" from a religion. There's a reason nonreligious people are the third largest belief group in the world (you provided the evidence).
At 2/2/07 10:44 PM, Imperator wrote: Notice, the country with the most technological advances, and most scientific progress (USA) is ranked at 3% on this list of atheists/agnostics. This is completely counter to your argument.
Actually, Imperator, that is an inaccurate claim. The US is known for having a particularly strong religious tradition, one far and above that of virtually every other modernized country. That means using the US as a demonstration will not reflect modernized civilizations as a whole accurately.
At 2/1/07 06:57 PM, Zoraxe7 wrote:At 2/1/07 06:38 PM, Keldtin wrote: I thought you'd like to know (this is a great blow against the creationists)If life wasnt supposed to happen than it must have happened by chance, but for that to happen the right amount of chemicals would have to have come together in the right amount of quantities, under the right amount of pressure and temp, and controlled for a length of time.
Intelligent design can naturally occur if the initial conditions of an ecologycal system are very precisely put.
The right amount of basic, very common molecules. The quantities naturally arrange. Any pressure that would still allow hydrogen to be a gas works. Any temperature that still allows hydrogen to be a gas works. Any length of time above a minute works, but the longer it is the better the probability of life forming by then.
Evolutionists agree that the probobillity of atoms and mollucules falling into place by random is less than 1 in 10 to the 50th power (10 X 10, 50 times) or 1 followed by113 zeros (that is larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe).
Ah, no, they don't. And 1 x 10^50 has 50 zeroes, not 113. I'm not sure how you made that number up. By the way, particles don't act at random.
The chance that all 2000 proteins neaded for a cell that would come together to form a living cell is 1 in 10 to the 40000 power, mathematicians dismiss as never taking place anything that has a probobility of less than 10 to the 50th power. So life being created like that is proboble how it happened, but not if there is no god, math is on my side.
It is very obvious that life did not form by the spontaneous creation of a cell. First of all, you don't need 2,000 proteins, only 20 amino acids for a full cell. Second, proteins are effectively irrelevant for the first life; only something equivalent to DNA (probably RNA) and a membrane of some sort is required.
Membranes of various sorts, especially lipids, are known to form spontaneously. All that is necessary for the DNA-equivalent is any organic chain that self-replicates. The primitive Earth environment, as far as we know, was full of organic molecules of all types forming in a volcanic broth. The odds of life were actually pretty good.
At 2/1/07 02:27 PM, Dre-Man wrote: Actually it is, we just haven't found it yet, just because we don't have the technology to perfectly determine pi doesn't mean that it isn't finite. And what scripture do you quote this to, I've never read that in the bible.
It has been mathematically proven that Pi has an infinite number of decimal places.
At 1/31/07 11:37 PM, SolInvictus wrote:At 1/31/07 09:17 PM, Draconias wrote: It's an irrelevant issue. If the truth has been conclusively discovered and proven beyond a doubt, your inability to recognize it does not change anything. Eventually you won't be here anymore, and potentially more capable people will replace you.i'm not trying to argue whether or not absolute truth is true or not simply the fact that truth still requires one to accept it as the truth. the problem with religion is it doesn't require anything science can or cannot prove all it needs is people to accept and believe it.
And that's why Science will win in the long term because Science does have things which can be proved or disproved. If Science fights for long enough, Religion will inevitably lose because it has nothing except belief to support it. You can fight belief, but you can't fight facts (easily).
Religion <(X.X)> O--('.'Q) Science. It's just the nature of the two things.
At 1/31/07 05:27 PM, SolInvictus wrote:At 1/31/07 04:54 PM, Draconias wrote: Truth is absolute.and where we finally decide what is truth is the mind. all the proof you want will not make a person with no connection to reality believe what you believe. how do i know you really exist?
It's an irrelevant issue. If the truth has been conclusively discovered and proven beyond a doubt, your inability to recognize it does not change anything. Eventually you won't be here anymore, and potentially more capable people will replace you.
At 1/30/07 10:12 PM, SolInvictus wrote:At 1/30/07 09:34 PM, MegaGold wrote: It will take another good couple of hundred years, but it will disprove a lot of religions soon enough,how can you disprove something that exists relative to the mind of an individual?
Truth is absolute.
At 1/21/07 04:32 AM, bradford1 wrote: A lot of crime only exists because society can be so unfair at times that the only way for some to keep their heads above the water is to break society's rules.
In America (or wherever the situation took place in besides America), it's perfectly legal to sell a drug for 10 times the production cost. This accepted action pushed the man whose wife was dying into a corner, where his only option was to break the rules.
If only that was true. The "corner" was only in his own mind. The man had several other options he did not pursue:
A. Borrowing money. Contact friends, family, philanthropists, the bank, the state, the media/public, your employer, your church, a charity, anyone who might let you have or borrow money, and talk to them about it.
B. Scrounge up the money. Get another mortgage on your house, sell your house, sell your car, sell that antique vase you own, call in debts, break open the retirement fund, make a deal with the pharmacist, whatever you can possibly do.
C. Go somewhere else. Don't waste time with this scamming pharmacist, go somewhere else and buy from another, cheaper source. If the medicine costs so much (both the man and the town can't afford it), then $50 for plane tickets is negligible.
D. Allow her to die. Come to terms with the fact that everyone dies eventually and even the medicine you want to buy may not save her. You could lose everything you have to give her a couple more years (maybe) or she could decide not to fight it.
That's a lot of options, a lot of choics. At the very end, it is still a crime to steal the medicine, but he wouldn't be judged too harshly for the crime regardless of what happens to his wife. It will be seen as an act of desperation, but it is a crime nonetheless.
At 1/29/07 01:23 AM, JudgeDredd wrote: What, other than sulfur dioxide production which causes acid-rain, can easily off-set warming, and is still pro-industry, but without harming human health or food production?
Water. Clouds are one of the most effective sun reflecting mechanisms available, and although excessive clouds can affect plants, for the most part they do not cause any harm. Producing extra water vapor may not be a smart idea, but seeding clouds is relatively easy in any moist areas, especially between growing seasons.
Also, recent research I've heard (Discover February 2007 issue, I think) suggests that this is actually happening already as a natural buffer to global warming effects (heating the oceans produces more vapor which means more clouds, but not necessarily more storms).
At 1/27/07 05:58 PM, BanditByte wrote: I'm surprised there isn't a slur for iranians.
Semites. Persians.
Both would offend many Iranians, both are entirely accurate terms for Iranians.
At 1/27/07 06:55 PM, Begoner wrote: Does gravity exist?
Sorry, but your analogy is invalid. Gravity is a direct, easily measurable force that acts according to understanble mathematical laws. Global Warming, on the other hand, is a relative state in a chaotic system with billions of variables, an unknown level of natural variation, unknown buffering effects, unknown consequences except in the truly extreme, unknown repercussions from those consequences, and is virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy over either the long or short term.
The two aren't at all similar.
Speaking of objective journalism, how come I never heard anything about Saddam not having WMDs on the news? Or about there being no links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda?
Were you listening? The news sure as hell went on about that for awhile. How do you think you got the idea that anyone even claimed Saddam / AQ links and WMDs was the sole goal? By the way, Saddam DID have some WMDs we've dfiscovered-- they just weren't the nukes we were expecting.
At 1/27/07 05:16 PM, stafffighter wrote:At 1/27/07 10:11 AM, MindControlFun wrote:We didn't elect him the first 2 tmes.
He's in full legality to do so, but who the fuck's gonna re-elect him?
Yes, we did. The first time was an electoral victory, sure, but the second time he won both the electoral and majority votes by a fairly wide margin.
At 1/26/07 07:46 AM, Camarohusky wrote: Anyone who thinks science and religion conflict is an idiot!
there is only a conflict if one is so shallow as to CREATE one. Science cannot prove god doesn't exist, and religion cannot conviniently overlook science.
Who are you to call all who oppose you idiots? The conflict between Science and Religion is that Science says that Religion is wrong whenever Religion tries to describe physical things in the world. Science is a set of competing ideals, and Religion can not accept any who oppose them; thus, conflict is inevitable.
At 1/25/07 08:16 PM, InsertFunnyUserName wrote:At 1/25/07 07:53 PM, mrpiex wrote: Homoshmexuals are just people who think that there friends are shmexy. I have nothing against the female side of this issue, but the male side.... *SHUDDER* Who wants to think about it?You know, it's people like you who I really hate. You think that lesbians are okay but gay people aren't. With this case, you have no argument because the argument that you do have is very sexist.
When issues of sexuality and intercourse are being discussed, gender-based qualifications are a necessity, not sexism. It is absolute fact that intercourse is distinctly different between the genders and that is critically relevant for this topic.
Sure, he may be an idiot, but he isn't sexist for bringing up the truth of the issue for the majority of males. It is simply a fact that the general view of lesbians is relatively positive in an objectifying sense and the general view of gay males is distinctly negative, and his comments get to the root of that problem.
At 1/25/07 04:14 PM, Smc316 wrote: have u ever wondered wat the captains of bleach anime did all day? i do! there the leaders of the soul society so y is it weve never seen them talk about politices? this topic is to post on about wat would be decided, who would say it, and why they would say it to begin with!
Let me translate this so most people can understand it:
In one anime show I watched called Bleach, an elite group of "spirit" humans command an army of "spirit" samurai who ensure that souls pass intto the afterlife properly. I have been wondering whether or not those elites discuss politics in their huge amount of free time. If they did discuss such things, what would they decide, which characters would propose what, and what would be their rationale?
Or in other words, this doesn't even belong on Newgrounds.
