What change? We have a trillion dollar pork bill getting bludgeoned through congress right now. Essentially the President said to congress "Just make it big, and make sure we have some token expenditures on energy subsidies. Otherwise, here's the checkbook. Yes, there's more than a thousand economists against this, but we're going to ignore them and listen to the ones who are Democrats."
So far, the new boss looks a lot like the old ones, except being black, young, and charismatic. plus ca change...
Also, sustainable energy is an engineering problem (unless by "sustainable energy" we mean proven technologies like nuclear, which leftists inevitably don't). No amount of Presidential hope-rays is going to make windmills or solar cells more efficient.
Rest assured, however, that we will give more money to corn farmers for ethanol, despite the fact that it is neither environmentally or economically sound as an energy source. Obama comes from a corn state.
Yes, I do hope he's marginally better than what came before. But this attitude that "I hope he's the one to make change stick", I just don't understand. There's only so much change you can make atop the world's largest bureaucracy.
> Rest assured, however, that we will give more money to corn farmers for ethanol, despite the fact that it is neither environmentally or economically sound as an energy source. Obama comes from a corn state.
Cue the Corn Cartel. Did you know you can use corn syrup to melt snow and ice on roads? No need for salt. No more salt-induced auto body rust. All praise for corn.
But seriously, now. I do hope corn ethanol does not get promoted.
Most of the green lobby is opposed to nuclear, and the "alternative energy" push is largely a project of the green lobby.
Show me an example of where Obama and the Democrats (excellent name for a rock band) have promised anywhere near as much money for nuclear development as they have for "sexy" and ineffective tech like solar, wind, and biofeuls.
"Nuclear power, as I said before, is going to be an important part of our energy mix," said physicist Steven Chu, Obama's secretary of energy during his confirmation hearing on January 14. "It's 20 percent of our electricity generation today, but it is 70 percent of the carbon-free portion of electricity today. And it is baseload. So I think it is very important that we push ahead." He added: "There is certainly a changing mood in the country because nuclear is carbon-free, that we should look at it with new eyes."
With the money in the stimulus bill, they could have replaced 20% of the nation's electrical capacity with nuclear (a million megawatts of national capacity, $5 billion for 1,200 megawatts of nuclear power, round down a bit to make the math easier). I doubt the actual bill goes towards anything so useful. I'm not sure what is actually in the slop bucket, but I have heard that some will go towards subsidies for rather useless, but sexy, green tech.
If they believe in nuclear, they could put their money where their mouth is.
>unless by "sustainable energy" we mean proven technologies like nuclear, which leftists inevitably don't
Yeah, proven to need billions of dollars on a Government subsidy to limit liability to 10 billion dollars, no matter how much the plant makes, and no matter how much damage it does (wipe out a state? that's ok, 10 billion should cover that).
The Ad Council is my least favorite government agency. It takes billions of dollars from the public. In exchange it produces such necessary propaganda as "if you smoke pot, you'll kill babies on accident".
Meanwhile, no Ad Council advertisement has ever been shown to make a quantitative difference in the social dynamic it was meant to address.
Every time I see an AdCoucil ad, I can't help but thinking that they could have refunded a few thousand people their tax money instead of providing me with this "public service".
It sometimes affects what I write, but not in a bad way. If I see a comment that I wrote has poor karma, or a critical response to a comment I wrote has high karma, I will often go back and flesh out my argument better.
At least on Hacker News, it seems to be a sign that my comment was poorly written rather than against popular wisdom.
The most strict libertarians I can think of are the anarcho-capitalists. Even they do not desire a society with the absence of laws, but rather they desire a market it law and law enforcement to replace the public monopoly.
You can argue about whether or not that is realistic, but to say they desire no laws is unfair.
And yes, the LP has an overabundance of socially challenged types. A rational man should be able to weigh arguments by their worth and not by their bearers.
This fellow has no idea what the Libertarian ideal is. In his first paragraph he starts building his straw man ("tend to have less contact than the average person") and then it just all goes downhill from there.
Murray Rothbard would have torn this guy to pieces.
He is talking about a group of people who have less than average contact with other people. Some, hard core Libertarians seem to want the government to have a military. Everything after that point is debatable. Some think public roads are a bad idea, others are fine with public police forces etc.
As a movement it has some good ideas, but there is also a huge collection of irrational people that are pro Libertarian and have little understanding of human behavior. For example we removed most monopolies because they where a bad idea keeping a few that are more effective than breaking them up so many people seem to ignore the idea that monopolies are bad. In theory there might be little problem with monopolies until you start to consider how people behave.
PS: The articles of faith that underlie the standard Libertarian predictions of how the world will work under their system are largely derived from the capitalist myth, and share all its imbalances in how it understands and defines human nature. It is my belief that as long as Libertarian philosophy ties itself so closely to idealizing capitalism, or makes itself too absolutist in any other way, an attempt to get people to live by purely Libertarian principles will find itself fighting against aspects of human nature that it doesn't want to acknowledge, and if it doesn't compromise it will fail because it tries to make people only half human.
I'm fascinated by how impossible it is for geeks to have an intelligent conversation about religion. This was a good article that many people chose to misread.
Yes, there is no invisible man in the sky, and gays are normal people. Evolution is real. Look how smart you are.
Now, there is a fascinating history of religion in human society probably dating back 500,000 years. To most people, it continues today. Yet we are so insecure that we cannot examine that tradition as inquiring minds while noone is demanding that we accept it for ourselves.
Such intolerance and misbehavior from intellectuals! How do they interact in our society, hating and condemning most whom they meet, totally unwilling to take others at face value? I do not know. I hope that I can be more generous.
This article wasn't about that at all. It wasn't intelligent, it was well-written. There's a big difference.
And it isn't about intolerance, it's about getting your facts straight. There are certainly many valuable services rendered by religion, but he didn't go into them.
Besides, intolerance in this debate doesn't come from the geeks. It's not computer scientists organizing against gay marriage, or insisting their beliefs must be in the Pledge of Allegiance. If I'm intolerant of the fiction that others use to justify their intolerance, is that wrong?
From what I remember, there was nothing in the article about gay marriage, or the pledge of allegiance. The author wasn't even particularly religious, though he hinted at deist tendencies. He certainly wasn't advocating religion, rather he was discussing the role it played in the lives of its adherents, and what that meant for popular atheist advocacy.
But from the reaction on this thread, he could have been linking to a Jack Chick tract. The anti-intellectualism on display is stunning. It looks to me that a Pavlovian anti-religious response is kicking in and a bunch of folks are spewing worn out canned responses orthogonal to the topic at hand. The reason this topic was dead-ed is surely more due to the juvenile discussion here than the thought-provoking article.
Should we refuse to listen to Christmas carols over the holidays because California passed proposition 8? Ought we boycott history lectures that mention popes because of Catholic stances on birth control?
If we temporarily drop our feelings about how people ought to act and examine how people actually do act, I promise you that we will learn interesting things. What happened to the geek ideal of learning about the world around us?
What happened to the inquiring mind? When I meet people that think different from me, I try to understand what motivates them, why they are different, what their history is like, what their culture is like, and how they see me. That shouldn't be hard for smart people like you and me, and I think it's a valuable thing to do.
The downside is that when you start to understand people, you start to lose enemies, and it is fun to have enemies.
Sadly, there are few places where one can have a good conversation these days. Most of the people who are capable of interesting discussion are old. It seems few young people are learning the art of entertaining ideas without changing their minds. Such a flat society it will be when every conversation must be an occasion for advocacy or agreement.
But maybe I am missing your point and you are just going to restate how gay people are okay and evolution is correct again. How thrilling.
To throw away Christianity is to throw away Western Civilization and much of our heritage. I enjoyed this bit from TFA:
"Arguably, the highest achievements of the human species have been motivated by that instinctive spirituality just mentioned. The great cathedrals, the precious heritage of religious art and music, are not only monuments to religious belief, but more persuasive testimonies to and arguments for faith than the disputations of theology. Have you ever read the story of the conversion of St. Vladimir, the founder of the Russian Orthodox Church? He was, as the account goes, a pagan prince of the line of Rurik; and an enthusiastic pagan, having built several temples. Yet he was not quite satisfied with his religion, and agreed to hear deputations of Muslims, Jews, and Christians each deliver their respective sales pitches. The presentations of the first two were rather arid, but the Christians (who had come from Byzantium) put on by far the best show, high mass with all the smells and bells, rich vestments, singing, the whole nine yards. Vladimir was convinced - any religion that was so beautiful had to be the right one (it also didn't hurt that it had the least restrictive dietary rules, and no ban on booze). Accordingly, Russia became Christian, and Vladimir a saint - all on the basis of his aesthetic judgment.
I suppose these anthropological and aesthetic reasons explain why many people remain culturally Christian despite an abundance of doubts and discontents. They aren't willing to dismiss the spiritual out of hand; they see more benefit than detriment accruing to society from religion in spite of their doubts (as did Jefferson and Franklin); and they find Christianity aesthetically appealing (as did St. Vladimir). They are therefore unwilling to discard it in favor of the barren and austere horizon offered by the crusading atheism of a Dawkins. For my part, I'll wait to see whether Dawkinsianity produces anything equivalent to Chartres, Handel's Messiah or Mozart's Requiem, the Pietà or the Sistine ceiling. When it does we may re-evaluate it to see if it offers anything worthwhile."
In my mind, the highest achievement of the human species has got to be manned space flight, after that the internet (and all the engineering that goes with it), and then probably some of the larger public infrastructure projects (bridges/tunnels). All monuments to the pursuit of knowledge (and profit).
My biggest pet peeve has got to be the misattribution of human excellence to the divine. So many times "thank god" should really be "thanks to millions of man-years of trial and error, science and engineering, hard work, and lives lost figuring this stuff out" (I'm thinking miracle on the hudson, car crashes, lifesaving surgeries, etc.).
We have the capacity to separately acknowledge the good bits of the past while re-evaluating which bits make sense for the present time. Criticizing religion today doesn't throw away whatever achievements it may have been the catalyst for in the past.
No. Christianity is worthwhile because the Sistine Chapel is pretty. Whether or not the Christian god exists is undecidable and ultimately a McGuffin.
I grew up with a literalist/fundamentalist version of Christianity, and when I discovered the atheistic/materialistic/scientific worldview it came as a shock - I implanted on it immediately, the world made much more sense almost overnight and I lost all interest in anything remotely spiritual. Later on I discovered the rest of religion, and the intellectual shock was similar, but not much else changed. I still find the purely materialistic worldview perfectly satisfactory and I fully expect that it will continue to conquer everything in its path, up to and beyond the mind-body problem, but until then, and maybe even after then, I have no problem characterizing my lack of personal commitment to faith, God, or the spiritual as purely aesthetic. I can appreciate, to some extent, why other people prefer to believe it, and I can appreciate, to some extent, why many people on each side either can't or won't believe that sensible people could hold such obviously stupid and wrong beliefs. Every time I start to think that the religious have a monopoly on lack of curiosity, some atheist pops up and makes a spectacle of their own righteous single-mindedness. I prefer to cultivate a certain amount of genuine curiosity about, and appreciation for, the aesthetic preferences of the other 80% of the human race.
Well I take faith to mean "the belief in the existence of God." I doubt the comment intends to convince us simply that this belief exists (we know it does, and that many people hold it). An argument "for faith" is at the weakest something like "the belief in the existence of God is not an absurd one," and at the strongest "God does exist."
That's a pretty serious failure of logical aptitude, especially on a site like this. The point isn't that "god exists" but that "Russia is Christian" because of aesthetics, a somewhat important material fact.
No the point is that faith is meritorious because of aesthetics.
That Russia is christian because of aesthetics, and aesthetics are an argument for the merit of faith implies that the christian faith is more meritorious than, paganism, judaism and islam because it's the prettiest.
"Russia is Christian b/c of aesthetics" is one piece of evidence for the greater argument which is something like "these instances of inspiration demonstrate that faith in the existence of God is reasonable."
