Sorry, but no - I'm not responsible for other people's behavior, no matter how much you feel like I should be simply because I use the same term.
You've clearly got some issue with "feminism" and "feminists" - but it's not an issue I can help you with.
You and I have a very, very different understanding of what feminism is. You're coming at it from a direction and conceptualization of it that is, frankly, alien to me, and while I would love to have a discussion of the details and the genesis for those different approaches, I don't know if that would be terribly fruitful here.
You're basically trying to make me answer for things I've never said and beliefs I do not hold, but that happen to be held by people who use a term I use to describe my thinking. It's like asking a random "Christian" to justify and explain Westboro Baptist's behavior because they both think of themselves as "Christian" despite that term meaning vastly different things. Other than saying "some people are assholes" I really can't be bothered to try and explain their behavior and shrug.
What I can say is what *I* believe and what *I* subscribe to. For me, feminism is recognizing that there is a pervasive and harmful current in society along gender lines, and that it hurts EVERYONE, be they male, female or neither. It's not about victimhood, it's about recognizing that harm is being done constantly and wouldn't it be nice if we could stop hurting ourselves over stupid shit?
What do I mean by "harm"? Here:
Guy has kids, wife makes more money so he stays at home to watch the kids while he works. Guy would get a ration of shit from buddies and probably a great deal from himself. He's been taught his entire life that men work, that childcare is women's work and god forbid he not make at least as much if not more than his wife. That's INCREDIBLY harmful to him.
Guy loses his job. Guy has to take one that pays less. He now may see himself as less of a man because men are defined by their work in many ways; their value gets determined by what they make. Harmful.
Guy goes to see a movie, it's got a sad ending, he's bawling. Has to toughen up and say "it's dusty in here" or hide it, be ashamed of feeling something. Harmful.
Woman goes out to a bar and picks up a guy, they have sex. He's a stud, she's a slut. Harmful - to both parties, actually, since he's being defined by something stupid like his ability to find women to have sex with (making him less of a man if he fails) and she's being denigrated because she's having casual sex.
One common theme to all of these is that a man who doesn't act in a typically manly fashion is often insulted by being described as feminine, showing a general belief that "feminine masculine." Which is why many who try to address this harmful current in society: If feminine were seen as equal in status to masculine, there would be less damage done to ALL genders because it wouldn't be shameful to be more or less masculine or more or less feminine or to do manly things if you're a woman or womanly things if you're a man. Equal in status, not identical in function.
I guess that's the message one would get if they only look at the noisy assholes, but that's fair, since they are noisy assholes and make a disproportionate amount of noise. Fact is, though, that most feminists are actually just advocating for human rights for all.
Kind of like how one might get the impression that Slashdot is full of racist fucktards because a few noisy assholes are constantly posting crazy racist shit. Thing is, most people here are actually just nerds who want to discuss nerd stuff with other nerds, which is totally cool.
Or how one might get the impression that all gun owners are crazy morons with inadequacy issues who think it's somehow proving a point to get a bunch of yokels together and show up at various family restaurants armed to the teeth when public shootings are constantly being hyped up in the news. Fact is, most gun owners are just regular people who know how to comport themselves in public and don't think scaring the shit out of people is good pr.
Point here is that you (the general "you") would be well served to realize that if you're trying to dismiss a rather large segment of the population by using some kind of cartoonish stereotype, it might be worth looking at some of the quieter members of said group. Just sayin'.
The thing is, why should it matter if it's biology or a choice or a combination of both? We protect choices all the time. We protect biological destiny all the time. We protect things that are likely a mix of the two all the time. Why (other than that some people find it icky) should sexual orientation be any different?
People choose to follow a particular religion, and religious freedom is seen as a Good Thing in much of the western world. Yay tolerance for other people's choices.
People are born black, and racism is seen as a Bad Thing in much of the western world. Yay tolerance for other people's biology.
To be honest, as long as all parties are capable of and willing to consent, I don't give a fuck about who people fuck or why they fuck them. Maybe if I am one of the people involved in the fucking I might give a fuck, but really unless the "why" causes some kind of issue, I don't give a fuck. It might be of some academic interest, along the same lines as "why are some people left handed" but it seems like using "why" as a basis for tolerance or whatever is goofy.
Mind you, I agree with you that being gay is almost certainly very largely a result of biology, and I actually think that the people who are trying to do "conversion therapy" are monstrous just as it would be monstrous to try and get straight people to go gay. I'm just saying that choice or biology, people need to get the fuck over it and stop giving so much of a shit about other people's bouncy bouncy fun time.
Dyson spheres would glow in the infrared and therefore be pretty obvious. This is because they still have to radiate the heat produced by the star they enclose - otherwise their internal temperature would perpetually increase.
Isn't that purely supposition?
No, it's pretty well tested. Just because you don't understand something does not mean that no one does. Compare to geometry: you might not know how to construct a given shape, but you can probably say something about its properties given a few conditions that it must satisfy.
For example, we know that relativity is an extremely accurate description of the geometry of spacetime. We have proved mathematically that energy must be conserved, in addition to observational evidence. That gives us the conditions that a Dyson Sphere must satisfy: it must exist in a universe with the same physics. However, even setting aside that requirement -- if your technology can break the laws of thermodynamics, why would you need a Dyson Sphere?
The next time you feel compelled to argue that your ignorance is as good as someone else's knowledge, may I suggest in lieu of posting here that you start a television or political career?
It's actually less crazy than most of them.
Actually, hell let me throw a challenge at you:
Please explain the value in trying to understand gravity in a way that is general enough to also apply to numerous other fields that are deemed to "have value" but that excludes trying to understand human behavior.
If you can do so in a way that is meaningful and isn't intellectually dishonest I'll be surprised.
I use "probably" because I'm able to recognize the weaknesses and potential for flaws in the results inherent in any study that involves humans as the subjects and more importantly, the mind and behaviors. It's funny that you're taking someone being honest about known limitations of a field as somehow a bad thing. Instead of being intellectually honest and acknowledging that, should I have tried for rhetorical points and overstated my case?
As to your request for empirical evidence about the value of the experiments, you do understand that "value" is inherently subjective, right? There are plenty of people who find no value what-so-ever in science or any other intellectual pursuit (and we make fun of them here on
The tl;dr thing is this: I find as much value in trying to understand gravity as I do in trying to understand why human beings do the things they do, even if it's a hell of a lot harder to design experiments and the results are a hell of a lot muddier when you involve subjects as complex as humans.
There's different levels of replication.
In physics, you can generally replicate an experiment vary precisely if you've got a handle on the factors that went into that experiment - control the environment, etc. You can have an almost perfect replication. Yay, science!
In social psychology research you can't ever even approach that same level of control over the environment the experiment takes place in. The subject will be different - even if it's the same subject used in the first experiment, because people change over time/exposure. The interviewer will be different because people change over time. The dynamic between interviewer and subject will be different. The history of the subject will be different as will the history of the interviewer as will the place the interview is taking place, etc. etc. etc.
The best such research can do is to either find that there is a tendency for x to happen in y circumstances, but it might not always be the case.
And, actually, there is a fair amount of basic replication that goes on in many psychological studies; when I was in the field working on studies we would routinely include certain basic measures that had been used in tens of thousands of studies before and compare anticipated vs. actual outcomes.
But even if it doesn't get replicated it actually has some value in that it would indicate that whatever the original experiment felt was a contributing factor to the main reported effect, a lack of easy replication under mostly similar circumstances indicates that that factor probably isn't as strong as hypothesized, and it cuts off a (probably) blind alley.
Chromebooks work fine offline too. You do have to change a setting in Google Docs to enable offline use, and perhaps Gmail also suffers from this flaw, but it is trivially possible. It is not the default, which is frankly bizarre, but I bought mine to be a backup web development machine, so it's running debian in a chroot.
I'd love a $99 netbook. My current one is getting up in years, but it's great for tossing into a messenger bag; it fits the ultra-mobile lifestyle very well. $99 is cheap enough to be disposable; I am sure they would sell like hotcakes. I wasn't able to find any information about them on a cursory search, do you have a link that you could share?
Dude, seriously, you are such the caricature of an internet tough guy, it's fucking awesome. And I admire your commitment to the charade, too.
Just remember, some people aren't in on the joke and might take you seriously and think the incredibly stupid shit you're claiming you have done is a good idea.
Just saying "that's not cool" would do more than sitting around passively when you do see it happen.
I won't shit on people who don't say anything when they see something happen - maybe they're afraid, I don't know - but I certainly will applaud people who do say something.
Actually, what I want is for people to quit being assholes to each other over pointless bullshit, but that's not going to happen. It's not so much "treat me better" but more "treat EVERYONE better." That's not a man thing, a girl thing, a woman thing, or whatever - it's a person thing. And to be honest, the whole "men should put up with constant verbal abuse because they are manly" thing (paraphrased, of course) is pretty fucking stupid.
If one is incapable of engaging in an activity without a massive amount of insanely crude shit talking, perhaps one should not be spending time around other people until one becomes more civilized, no? In online gaming, fortunately, we have many options for removing those who won't remove themselves. Ignore lists exist for a reason, and being willing and able to kick or ban people who routinely go out of their way to shit on other people helps as well. I don't take shit-talking personally, as the person doing it knows nothing about me, but that doesn't mean I care to have my gaming time be an unending stream of abuse. I give people engaging in it 1 chance, and if they keep going after I politely request they tone it down, they (usually) functionally cease to exist for me. And, I should say, my threshold for what I consider egregious is pretty high, though usually some kind of highly targeted insult (usually to race, gender, etc.) will do the trick.
The reason for trying to cultivate a more civil community is not that I want to control what other people do or how they behave. It's that I really, really like gaming, I enjoy gaming online, and I want it to thrive and be something more people can partake in without feeling like they need to take a shower after every round because of all the terrible people they run across. A community dominated by trolls will die off very quickly; the best communities I've seen online are ones that have a bit of cultivation/moderation so that the absolute shitlords at least get weeded out.
Individuals, and individual rights, are like single atoms. They only exist in the abstract sense. The real world is entirely dominated by groups and collective actions.
You're a confused anarchist. The problem with non-coercive government is that all government is coercive. Government is primarily a set of restrictions on the use of force, or alternately the monopoly on that use of force. Getting rid of a government, or disarming it, merely allows anyone with a larger arsenal to set up their own government -- anarchy is an unstable system. We all have a right to violence, because it cannot be taken from us except in extreme situations. Remember, the Code of Hammurabi was instituted, "...so that the strong might not harm the weak." Coercive government is a necessary evil, and it will remain necessary so long as men are capable of harming their fellows, for that is its justification and primary purpose.
Rights are not inherent, except in some abstract sense. In the real world, your rights are what the men with guns say they are. You may feel fortunate that the world has had a long, bloody time to work out semi-cooperative frameworks to restrain our darker impulses. Individual rights are an important conceptual counterbalance to the overwhelming powers of the collective, but they are no justification for anarchy, economic or otherwise. The "free market" is an ideal, even a good one, but in most cases removing government interference makes markets less free, more subject to collusion and fraud. In some cases, where the service is required to be universal, or when the barriers to entry would be insurmountable, it makes sense for the government to assume these functions directly. Govenment can also be thought of as the natural monopoly of natural monopolies, in that sense.
Slavery is a word that has a specific meaning; your definition is specious. You just fundamentally don't like being told what to do. To some degree this idealism is admirable. For the true individualist, I can recommend (from long personal experience) the Alaskan wilderness; you can get land for free still up there, provided you build upon it. Whatever romantic images your mind conjures upon thinking of Alaska are all true; I can't stand the weather, personally, but it's as close to a pure state of nature as you will ever find. If you'd like to enjoy the benefits of society, however, you have to play by the rules. "Slavery" isn't an option -- it's mandatory.
Your post paints an overly simplistic view.
No, it does not. It is not a view, it is fact. When the Earth's atmosphere has a higher partial pressure of CO2 it retains more heat. That is the essential point under consideration, and the exact value of the partial pressure is irrelevant and was not mentioned. We're not talking about the political issues, or the history of the planet, only cold hard measurable facts about [a] the relationship between irradiance and re-radiation, and [b] the absorption spectrum of CO2.
However, on the separate subject you have noted, while we are indeed two orders of magnitude away from the highest CO2 levels, and the highest rates of emission, the previous atmospheric changes happened over the course of millions of years and are usually associated with mass extinctions. We've already been doing pretty well on the mass extinction front; this may not be a good time to rock the boat.
If, as I have been told, conservatives are against change, can we maybe try to not pollute every square inch of the planet? I'm from rural Alaska, and it's getting a bit melty up there. It's not a place that I really enjoy living, but the glaciers were fairly pretty, and have you seen what permafrost does when it melts? Clearly this isn't a problem where you live, but please let's not pretend that it isn't an issue elsewhere. Pollution of any sort is ugly.
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
