1,397 Forum Posts by "AxTekk"
Big question: Does anyone think prisoners should be allowed and aided to commit suicide?
And would the crime they committed or their conduct in prison change your response?
If you think about this question, then think about the death penalty I think it makes some different issues apparent. Do we care about the welfare of prisoners? Do we just want these people to hurt? Do we care about rehabilitating prisoners? Where do the distinctions between prisoners lie on this question?
At 8/26/13 12:09 AM, coldplayguy77 wrote: I belive if its your third major offense you should be put in front of a gun squad. and by major offens i mean murder/rape/abuse(deping if it involves a child or not) But thats what i belive.
Are you like the Carefoot of the Politics forum or some shit?
I'm not sure whether it's an NG thing, because I've seen the same irl, but I think it's interesting how neat the dividing line is between those who say "The justice system should be for everyone, let's rehabilitate criminals" and those who say "The justice system is for punishment, kill the fuckers".
IDK really, I think a person's position on this kind of thing changes a lot with age and life experiences so I try not to get too self righteous but the most pragmatic way I can see is not to have the death penalty. It's cheaper, plus, dealing crack is supposed to be more dangerous than death row, so it probably even gets rid of more criminals.
I'm not sure I have the heart to lecture victims, but I don't like the idea that we should kill criminals to make mourning relatives happy. I get that in some cases where the criminal was a real fucker and did a lot of damage to a family it can bring much needed closure though, and that argument is valid to some degree.
So again, I don't know. Not having death penalty seems more pragmatic, but in some cases the death penalty might have some value. Having said that though, I feel like in the American context it's more of an excuse for self righteous anger. Case in point: Ask someone who supports the death penalty if murderers should be allowed to kill themselves. Pretty much all the staunchest proponents of the death penalty I've spoken about this with say "No" which to makes no objective sense (unless the objective is just to hurt people "who deserve it" as much as possible rather than making the country a better place for everyone).
At 8/24/13 03:03 PM, Grimdalus wrote: All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.
OK, one - Liberalism circa 1915 =/= Liberalism circa 2015 and two - I'm really not sure if I want to be lectured on slavery by an ideology that used actual forced labour camps. (Although apparently many people in this thread support the exact same thing being implemented for non political crimes.)
A wild Carefoot appeared
Quite possibly the most effective derail the Audio Forums have ever witnessed.
At 8/24/13 11:20 AM, Teqneek wrote: Sooooo, anybody seen any good movies lately?...
God I'm so bored.
Saw Good Will Hunting a couple nights ago, shit was awwweesome (and free online fuckyeah). Same for Great Dictator by Chaplin (and in glorious 720p).
Can't lie I'm hella bored too. So bored I've regressed to the politics forum. Never a good sign.
At 8/24/13 11:18 AM, Grimdalus wrote: I've never really taken you seriously because you are liberal but not a communist.
lol dis niqqa
At 8/24/13 06:13 AM, Light wrote: One thing I've always wondered about the existence of God is its purpose.
If God does exist, why?
To strip gay people and women of their rights, stoopid.
At 8/23/13 01:24 AM, Cynical-Charlotte wrote: Castrate the rapist, castrate the molester, fine the thief double if the property cannot be returned.
The smiley adorning this post genuinely disturbs me...
At 8/23/13 11:38 PM, Psycho666 wrote:At 8/10/13 04:07 PM, Feoric wrote: It's funny how if a source questions the authority of the United States it is suddenly highly credible. RT has zero journalistic integrity. Look no further than their coverage on Syria and Libya at the time that was going on.Just curious. How do you judge credibility, integrity, and quality of coverage? The goal of a news company is to make money, not to report the news.
BBC doe.
Thing is, financial vested interests reduce the credibility of a news source but a lack of financial vested interests doesn't guarantee credibility. RT are aight if you're a bit of a lefty, because they do a lot of great opinion pieces that fit with that world view. They also give you an angle Americans generally aren't used to, and I guess that means you get a more balanced view on whole. RT are FARRRR from impartial though, I'd say just as unnecessarily opinionated as Fox.
So, yeah, BBC ftw.
At 8/23/13 03:11 PM, Cynical-Charlotte wrote:At 8/23/13 03:04 PM, AxTekk wrote: Or the laws might not have always existed. Or there might be situations we haven't observed in which the laws do not function. Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but it's really not so that "there must be something outside of all laws".Reminds me of the motto from Assassin's Creed, "Nothing is true; everything is permitted."
Since we cannot establish any truth, we might as well not even acknowledge it. Atheism, theism, omniism is infinitely false.
It's not that we cannot establish any truth, it's just that we flat out don't know enough on this particular question right now. It's not saying we don't know anything to acknowledge the boundaries of what we do know.
And nor is it that atheism, theism etc etc are false, they're just hypotheses that haven't been validated yet so we can't presume them to be true. Doesn't mean we can't say that the evidence mainly falls on one side or another.
At 8/23/13 01:57 PM, Cynical-Charlotte wrote: Both positions behave in the same way. On the one hand, you might ignore all the established laws of science to suit an eternal universe - or, you might attribute exemption from all the established laws of science to suit an eternal creator.
Or the laws might not have always existed. Or there might be situations we haven't observed in which the laws do not function. Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but it's really not so that "there must be something outside of all laws".
So yes, the answer to life, the universe, and everything is infinitely 42.
Douglas Adams is 2doep tho
At 8/21/13 06:00 PM, BrokenDeck wrote: For those of you who might be interested, the audio portal search options have been updated and it is now much easier to find hip hop instrumentals.
Feckin' win! Thanks man, that's a huge help.
At 8/22/13 10:27 PM, Cynical-Charlotte wrote: My eye is on the topic from time to time - but in reading through conversations, I have felt that the participants of thread, and the forum in general, is highly antagonistic towards all theistic faiths. Even after a "respectable" discussion, it becomes a brouhaha for the anti-religious. So, I am never encouraged to post here my thoughts on anything having to do with Judaism or Christianity. Ordinarily, I discuss such controversy on other, more diverse boards with less hostile communities.
Ahahaa, I dare say this thread's purpose is just to contain the worst of the theist/ atheist. Bracketed morality and all that. Really, I don't think anyone's deluded enough to think they're going to convert anyone on either side over the internet. Also which boards do you hang out on bro?
I feel like more theists are needed in this thread. Could someone drop Shaggy a pm or some shit?
I'm actually really touched by OP's genuine feelings and idealism. But the system you're laying out is hopelessly utopian, I doubt even you could go live by it's rules. Or even be happier that way.
Technology is freaking awesome. Child morbidity has been slashed and slashed again. We can all expect to live at least to an age previously reserved for Roman emperors, and do so twice as hygienically. If we don't it's probably because we've enjoyed some aspect of modern civilisation a little too much. Even better, modern science has widened everyone's understanding of the universe beyond the cosmological ideas the Buddha spent forty years meditating to achieve or Ptolemy spent a lifetime pushing numbers to guess at. The internet has made all this knowledge and all our interpretations and feelings about it universally accessible. As an 18 year old wage slave who couldn't afford uni, even a lazy, broke teenager was able to get his hands on more knowledge than could have been held in the Library of Alexandria and had a worldwide community to talk about it with.
If people are going without, or if we aren't enjoying it we only have ourselves to blame. Civilisation itself should be welcomed with open arms.
At 8/21/13 02:41 PM, Camarohusky wrote: Manning and Snowden are not whistleblowers. They held items of national security. So unlike a corporate whistleblower, or even a generaic governmental whistleblower, they are not allowed to indiscriminately give these serets out. There is one better way to get these secrets dealt with without jeoprdizing national security. That is the reveal them to a congressmember. Even though many Congress members are complicit, there are always a select few who are not. Manning and Snowden could have contaced...
Drum roll...
RAND PAUL. [...]
That's actually really interesting. I suppose that really would be the most sensible thing to do, and send someone trusted the documents for safe keeping. Given, Bradley Manning was farrrr from mentally stable, so you probably couldn't expect him to do something so rational but another Snowden, maybe. I really think people should be told though, it might at least minimise the damage another whistleblower could manage (assuming they don't want to cause damage).
At 8/21/13 04:50 PM, orangebomb wrote: At least Manning is taking his punishment, whereas Snowden is hiding in Russia where they have far less rights and liberties than America. Ironic isn't it?
I'm really not sure this is that ironic. Snowden's obviously in the position now where he either swallows his high moral code or becomes a martyr, and, given his rap sheet, he's not going to get another chance to make a difference. If I was in the same position it wouldn't make any difference to me. If I'm in a country that's just the lesser of two evils and taking a shot at making it a little less evil means I have to go live in a different one, taking that shot would still be the right thing to do.
Of course, whether or not that's what Snowden achieved is highly debatable.
At 8/20/13 04:38 PM, Chaos-Phoenix wrote: Can you count the # of times the Daily Show or The Colbert Report poked fun @ the NSA? Wonder when THEY’LL get their cease & desist letters.
To be fair the big difference there is the comedians aren't using any NSA logos. You can't sue someone for making t- shirts mocking you, but you can sue them if they put your face on it. . The regular rinsing the NSA gets probably just made them tetchier.
At 8/20/13 08:37 PM, Camarohusky wrote: Courts nothing. More likely the NSA sent a cease a desist letter (not a legally binding document) and the company caved immediately.
Well that cut through the BS. Glad we have experts round these parts haha.
At 8/22/13 12:00 AM, Angry-Hatter wrote:At 8/21/13 11:46 PM, SteveGuzzi wrote: It's a thread about whether a massive flood event (referenced in far MORE than just the book of Genesis) has any historical basis or not.And my VERY first post in this thread was me pointing out that there is NO evidence that any such massive flood has ever occurred. "Thread over", I said, but here we are, 3 pages later.
TBF Angry Hatter, it's more about whether a Sumerian flood occurred, and all these myths are based off of that. Even that still seems highly dubious, especially given how different a lot of these stories actually are.
Also, no one argues a common root for stories that support, say, the existence of giants although they're present in stories just as widely spread. This is because we accept that some symbols just have inherent meaning to humans. However, throw in the bible and some creationists with an interesting approach to facts and even a few sane people lose perspective.
At 8/21/13 04:51 PM, 24901miles wrote:At 8/21/13 04:24 PM, Light wrote: There can't possibly be anything before the universe came to be. Time came to exist at the big bang(Or perhaps before? I'm no expert in physics. :P) and so nothing could come before it.Right. The big bang (and Oscillating Crunch, etc, and all theories related to the function of astrophysical spacetime) is a theory which traces the structure of the universe as best as we can describe it with all applicable data. It's impartial. Yet, it's always countered with philosophical arguments which don't really equate. "But there must be something eternal". "You cant draw a function without a pen and a hand. Hand of God!" etc.
The entire discussion gets tiresome after a while. It's just people who spent several decades learning about centuries of work in order to study billions of years of the inner workings of the universe... squaring off against people who spent a couple decades coming up with philosophical arguments to justify their own belief system which evolved out of ancient mythology.
Fucking this. I respect people who do believe in God, just because we're human and the belief in something higher/ prayer etc. does seem to appeal to the humanity in us, but, at the end of the day, very few people were moved to belief in God by rationality.
We all are moved to believe that something existed before time, came to be out of nothing etc. It's just a choice as to whether you want to make it a very highly and (imho) unnecessarily complex being like a conscious creator being with a human moral code or whether you want to make it something a great deal less complicated that squares with what we know about physics a little better.
But whatever helps people sleep at night really. We're all human and believing in mythologies and higher powers is written in our genome. We can't pretend to be above it at all.
At 8/21/13 01:56 PM, orangebomb wrote: There will still be whistle blowers out there who are defiant enough to break the law in order to point out what they think is an injustice. The problem is that whistle blowers like Snowden and Manning broke the law to spill secrets when they weren't supposed to, and they claim it's to defend our freedoms, when in reality, much of it ranges from isolated incidents to a necessary evil.
Ok, just to cut right through this - would you want whistle blowers to exist at all? If so what avenues would you have them encouraged to use? My problem with this isn't that I think Bradley Manning was right to put active personnel in the line of fire. It's that this seems to have become about intimidating whistleblowers rather than punishing them for taking the wrong avenue, or not waiting for an acceptable period of time to pass.
At 8/21/13 12:27 PM, Camarohusky wrote:At 8/21/13 12:19 PM, AxTekk wrote: 21/8/13 will go down as the day Tony lost any rights to bitch about the lack of public accountability in the US Military .The Manning issue has nothing to do with accountability in the military. It has everything to do with trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons in the worst way possible. (Think killing someone to keep them from stealing your wallet.)
Don't get me wrong, Manning deserves time for doing this in a way that put men on the field at risk, I just don't think it deserves half a lifetime behind bars. I think it's more about intimidating would-be whistleblowers than encouraging them to use a safer avenue. (Perhaps sending the documents directly to a responsible media outlet, if that isn't an oxymoron.)
At 8/21/13 10:48 AM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote:At 8/21/13 10:46 AM, Light wrote:then the 20 years added for pleading guilty for the 18 lesser charges.At 8/21/13 10:31 AM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: Manning Sentenced to 36 years.A sad day for all.
21/8/13 will go down as the day Tony lost any rights to bitch about the lack of public accountability in the US Military .
At 8/20/13 08:04 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote:At 8/20/13 09:48 AM, AxTekk wrote: 1 - If Sub Saharan African genetics are responsible for the BW difference, why is it that slave- descendant African Americans (the vast majority originally from West Africa, where there are many ethnicities far more closely related to Sumerian ethnic groups than to those further south) seem to score the same as other black Americans?I'm not sure what is meant here. Heritability estimates for IQ differences between races [or any two populations] depend on the populations being measured, because both the genetic component and the environmental component will end up varying.
To my knowledge, AA's do not score the same as Saharan's, [The data I've seen has them score higher] but I may be misreading your question.
Also, bear in mind that the fact that two particular populations with presumably different genetics score the same on a particular metric, does not mean that any two populations must have the same scores when put in identical environments. The causes for the difference between two populations are not necessarily the same as the causes for the difference between any other two populations.
That's odd, the studies I've seen have African immigrants and their children scoring higher than AAs. This doesn't make sense through the genetic perspective, not because they're two different populations but because AAs are generally a mix of peoples with Congolese ethnogenesis and those with Sumerian ethnogenesis (plus European genes from their time in America). So why would a group of black people with more European and Mid-Eastern genes under perform against a group with less?
I fail to see the significance to the original topic.
If you don't make that argument, then that's fine. It poses serious problems for advocates of Rushton's theories like pox though, and also raises a big question mark over the validity of his research.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994WSJmainstream.pdf
"2. Intelligence, so defined, can be measured,and intelligence tests measure it well.They are among the most accurate (in technicalterms, reliable and valid) of all psychologicaltests and assessments. They do notmeasure creativity, character, personality, orother important differences among individuals,nor are they intended to."
I'm also not entirely sure how one even quantifies the sophistication of art and poetry. You always "say" that one group has or does not have sophisticated art and perhaps get away with it, but actually ranking one civilization against another is entirely holistic and subjective. [...]
...I'm not totally sure of the point you're making. Do you think the average IQ (as measured today) of an ethnicity determines whether or not these people could ever run a successful and sophisticated society? Or do you believe the only possible place for them is as second class citizens? If you do like Pox, clearly Mexican Latinos refute that point.
I'd also say that if you think ethnic IQ is unchanging, Mexican Latinos would demonstrate that IQ would be irrelevant to the creation of art, architecture, infrastructure (ie: the roads and the Incan mail system), religion, social hierarchy, mathematics, astronomy, literature (both religious and secular), music and a sophisticated military. Basically that IQ was no insurmountable impediment to a people's ability to create and coexist in a functional and sophisticated society.
4 - If the grade difference observed between races is due to genetic differences (and thus should be universal) why do black working class British children outperform their white counterparts?Can you show me the data?
Sure, it was in the link I put in earlier but tbf it was quite a way down the article. The exact percentages were in the BBC article earlier and I don't think the black percentage is in this one, but here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9071991/British-children-from-poorest-homes-being-failed-at-school.html if you need evidence that the black working class is outscoring the white one.
One quick answer, assuming what you say is true, is that most IQ gaps go away when you control for SES. Likewise, SES gaps between the races go away when you control for intelligence. But there's far more evidence that IQ is the causal variable than there is it being the response variable, as was once believed.
Could you give me some links on this? That's pretty interesting, but given how variable SES has been in Britain in the last fifty years I'm somewhat dubious that all the smart genes are on top.
Also it is worth pointing out that much of the African Immigration to the UK consists in exchange students, meaning they are not a representative sample of the population.
This is flatly nonsense. Nor would exchange students make up the working class black population as none would qualify for free school meals (our criteria for a child's social class). Have you ever been to the UK?
At 8/20/13 04:19 PM, Cynical-Charlotte wrote:At 8/20/13 11:07 AM, Camarohusky wrote: Hell.I was referring to natural events explained through similar mythology. If the flood myths originated separately, I would like to know of other independent catastrophes which were explained on the same scale.
Heroic epics.
Many creation myths have odd similarities.
And while we're here, I'll go for evil snakes. Given that the idea of evil, mystically powerful serpents is present in the Far East, Middle East, Africa, Europe and Meso-America I think it's safe to assume there really are malignant, magical snakes out to get us.
Or giants, what the heck. Giants are also as widespread and require less on the human sacrifice side of things.
At 8/20/13 04:26 PM, Cynical-Charlotte wrote: What's your point? Kenya and Tanzania are in East Africa.
My bad lol didn't get that you were referring to that.
I would go into the spread of religion (specifically paganism) from Sumer, but these are more vague than simply finding commonalities between different cultures' flood narratives. My confusion is why a tradition cannot be passed down from the origin of civilization.
I think you're becoming confused. A large number of cultures do have Sumerian roots, or would at least be open to Sumerian influence, but Polynesians, Mesoamericans and Hindus (at least, Vedic era Hindus) would probably be original stories. Maybe explaining why they're actually such different stories.
Also, the stories I gave you are very widespread and have at least as many cross culture similarities. This is because there are some symbols that just have inherent meaning to people. Water is definitely one, probably one of the strongest ones. I would also contend, going down the list I gave you, how you could argue that all mythology started in Sumeria given how few of these mythemes appear in Sumerian religion.
At 8/20/13 09:52 AM, Light wrote: lol, I asked that question earlier in this thread and the OP has yet to respond to it.
At 8/20/13 09:34 AM, Light wrote: Explain why historians and anthropologists haven't come to the conclusion that these flood myths all originate from the Fertile Crescent region.
More to the point, can you explain why historians, geologists and anthropologists haven't come to the conclusion that there was a worldwide flood.
Seeing as this thread's already been bumped, I just thought I'd leave a few questions here.
1 - If Sub Saharan African genetics are responsible for the BW difference, why is it that slave- descendant African Americans (the vast majority originally from West Africa, where there are many ethnicities far more closely related to Sumerian ethnic groups than to those further south) seem to score the same as other black Americans?
2 - Can anyone who buys into Rushton's race data point out any studies that show black people have larger erect penises than whites? I would of course expect data not published by AmRen members. I mention because the largest sampled studies I have seen suggest a similar member size when height is controlled for (Kinsey's famous 60s study put black and white size around 13.3 cm when height was controlled for. this study put 300 Italian penises around the same length, ditto for Nigerians and South Koreans.)
3 - Can anyone who provides anthropological arguments on race/ IQ explain why Mexican Latinos (a mixture of Europeans and a number of races capable of highly sophisticated pottery, art, architecture and mathematics) score so badly on IQ tests?
4 - If the grade difference observed between races is due to genetic differences (and thus should be universal) why do black working class British children outperform their white counterparts?
