Is "thief" an identity? I say you're projecting an identity on a group of people you label as SJWs because I don't know if the group you think exists actually exists in any cohesive manner. Also, it's a bit like "racists" or "misogynists", most of the people you would put in the group probably wouldn't think they belong there. Often, I suspect the term is used to identify "people who have called me racist or sexist". I also suspect that more often than not the person has been called on their attitude multiple times and believes that since it's happened so often, the person choose to believe that there must be a conspiracy to silence them, rather than accepting that their beliefs or attitude is genuinely disliked for valid reasons by the people around them.

As far as I know there is not. There are people who use the terms too freely, but as far as I know, they are not part of any organised effort to police public behaviour.

I'm not arguing that the term needs to be changed. After all, what would be the point? I'm saying it is already effectively meaningless, much the way conservative talking heads have made liberal and progressive meaningless by ascribing it to virtually everything they don't like.

You've already projected the SJW identity onto them. I don't see how you can label a group and then claim it's not an identity.

This is your personal definition of SJW, it is not the same as the others I have been given, so it does appear that you are projecting your own personal beliefs about what is wrong onto this group and then dismissing their role in "civil society" based on what you think they have done. It seems like you're doing exactly what I said you would be doing.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that comments like that make my point. SJW is just another de-humanized group for people to project their personal devils onto.

Most of us are made by a woman, but I'll assume you mean the shirt. The people who are upset about this, and it doesn't seem like there's that many of them (your mention of this was the first time, I'd heard of it), are more upset that he wore it to a major press event and that no one thought to say, "Hey, before going on international television, maybe you'd like to change into something more appropriate?" To them, at least, this is indicative of a casual sexism endemic to the sciences and science reporting, where female scientists are judged by the appearance and male scientists by their accomplishments. The fact the shirt was made by a woman wouldn't actually matter to them and would appear to be disingenuous deflection because it's not the shirt, it's the where and the why it was worn that matters to the critics.

I would suspect that you're suffering from the false-consensus effect and projecting your beliefs onto other people in Gamergate, possibly also the halo effect with respect to the people who don't like Gamergate. Of course, if you are correct about Gamergate having a libertarian base, then everyone else would be relatively more authoritarian, virtually by definition since just about the only group less authoritarian than libertarians are anarchists.

Additionally, when I spent some time looking over the posts on the Gamergate hash tag, I noticed several references to culture war against the left, and in particular how offline conservatives should follow Gamergate's tactics (against Gawker and Kotaku) to deny left leaning publications advertisers, which is certainly not what I would expect from a mostly left leaning group that advocates against corruption in journalism. For that matter, why do some of these supposed libertarians think that censorship of views they dislike is a valid solution to "corruption"?

Beyond that, I wasn't actually talking about Gamergate itself, which is a somewhat random assortment of people who all happen to be outraged about vaguely similar things and have twitter accounts, but more specifically about the people who use SJW as a pejorative epithet (which may or may not significantly overlap the people in Gamergate). Of course, on the other hand, I'd never heard of the SJWs until a bunch raging Gamergaters start spewing it all over Slashdot, so there is that.

You must be new here, "SJW" is the new "liberal". As a straight white conservative male, everyone you hate is a obviously an "SJW", because it's just another synonym for evil, like liberal, progessive, gay or female.

Nothing, but I found it interesting to look at the price competitiveness of coal for new builds, which actually isn't very good and getting worse.

Natural gas appears to be the clear winner right now on pure price, even with a CCS system, they cost 2/3rds ($2.095 per KW to build) of what the cheapest coal plant without a CCS costs with comparable operating costs. Without a CCS system, they can get as low as 1/5th ($676 per KW to build) of what a new coal plant would cost with dramatically lower operating costs too.

Well there's a California wind power farm that covers 36 square kilometers and currently contains 490 turbines and generates 1,320 MW, with a planned capacity of 3,000 MW. So it looks like you can squeeze about 100 MW into a square kilometer (rounding up) than can be used for other purposes (such as agriculture or pasturage), so you'd have to dedicate 32,300 square km of land to meet the minimum power demand in ideal circumstances and 96,900 even we divide that by three. With 9,629,091 square km of land, you'd need to dedicate about 1% of the continental U.S. to meet that demand entirely using wind.

As a side note, it seems like the U.S. used 4.6 TW of power in 2013 (according to Wikipedia) so you've underestimated the amount of power the U.S. uses a bit. Also according to the Wikipedia, that's about 1/4 of the world's total electricity usage, used by less than 1/20th of the world's population. Apparently the average EU citizen uses electricity at about one half the per-capita rate of the average American. Anyway, using those higher figures, that would be about 1.5% of all of the contiguous United States land assuming you followed a wind-power only approach.

How much would it cost to replace America's current infrastructure with the exact same stuff?

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal plant costs between $2,934 and $6,599 per KW to build, while onshore wind costs $2,213 per kW to build. Even if you had to build three of them for each coal plant, the wind turbines are getting very close to the capital cost of coal plants that come with any carbon capture and storage system (CCS). Additionally, coal plant costs increasing and wind power costs decreased over the last 4 years.

Now if you can position the wind turbine in a location where it generates more than a third of the nominal capacity, the wind turbines start winning. If they were generating at 100% of the rated capacity they'd beat even the cheapest coal plant before you account for operations and maintenance and fuel costs.

The link you provided indicates that there's consensus on everything rsilvergun said there was consensus on. Furthermore looking at the particular graph you cited, the question was "what is the best course of action?" with 1 and 7 representing mitigation only and adaption only respectively. It seems like there's a consensus that we should take a mixed approach with a little over 88% of the respondents taking one of the 2-6 options and the modal option being 4, right in the middle.

Really? It seems like the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, Maos' Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and 9/11 were all "Values" based to me. The rise of Communism was a revolt against capitalist values, it was not a fact-based decision where communism was experimented with and found to be more efficient than capitalism and thus the conversion was rapidly and peaceably carried out. The Holocaust was a values-based decisions that Jews, gays, intellectuals, political opponents, and the Roma were evil and should be exterminated. The Great Leap Forward was ideologically based on the idea that collective farming must be better than individual farming, and the Cultural Revolution was ideological purge. The Khmer Rouge massacres were likewise based on the values of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, not on any factual basis. Ditto with 9/11 the hijackers believed that the U.S.A was evil and were willing to sacrifice their lives to humble America.

I left the witch hunts and Hiroshima out, because they actually are different from the others. From what I've heard the witch hunts were a sham and most people knew it at the time, but they were a convenient excuse to get rid of inconvenient women. I'm not sure whether that falls into either category, it was more bad policy that allowed petty revenges. Hiroshima (and Nagasaki), on the other hand, were political decisions where for right or wrong, the U.S. president (under advisement from the U.S military) decided that the value of the bomb to force an unconditional surrender from the Japanese and to scare the Soviet Union out of turning on the rest of the Allies was worth the cost in (then-enemy) lives. So you may have one on your list that isn't values based.

Generally speaking religious persecution is always values based, as are most atrocities. Although, I suppose it has been argued that Muhammad's slaying of the Jewish Qurayza tribe in Medina was results-based. They had no sponsers or allies, were outnumbered and surrounded, and Muhammad had just lost a major battle. He had the men and boys who had reached puberty slaughtered because he could do so, because it would be a display of power that would cement his own grip on power, and he would take their wealth and enslave their women and children with which he could reward his army with after they were defeated by a superior force. So I guess there's another one you can chalk up to result-based policy.

Personally, I think probably need fact-based policy guided by a set of good values rather than one or the other in isolation. Values without facts can lead to ineffectual and dangerous policies like the Great Leap Forward, Lysenkoism and abstinence-only education. Facts and results without values leads to rational actions that can be horrible, like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and forced sterilization of undesirables.

I looked through your examples and they're seriously underwhelming.

Have you got any real examples?

The Bush military doctrine and incompetence is indeed partially to blame from the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq. Combining the weakened and divided Iraq that that doctrine produced with the dogged Russian support for Syria's Assad regime created a power vaccum where ISIS could propser. In this case I wouldn't specifically blame Christians for the Islamic State because those decisions are more accurately attributed to the neo-conservative movement in the United States which mostly pays lip-service to being Christian.

Maybe, but they'll pretty soon convince themselves that they have a mandate and that they they were clearly elected to do whatever it is they want to do. As an example, Rob Ford, the (former) mayor of Toronto (the crack-smoking mayor) constantly claimed to be the best mayor of Toronto had ever had, and that he was elected with the largest mandate in the history of North America, etc... Even though he had the third highest percentage of votes among the three mayors the current city of Toronto has had (20 years ago the city was merged with several surrounding cities). You might think he was counting total votes, but he came in second on that count. The point is that there are politicians who will invent their own "truth" if the reality doesn't oblige them. Beyond that, I doubt any politician is bothered much by spoiled ballots, they often aren't even included or mentioned as part of the official results.

Personally, I think every election in every country should have an official none-of-the-above option that, if it wins, would void the election results, require a re-run of the election with all candidates who lost barred from participating until the next regularly scheduled election (in case none-of-the-above wins a few times in a row).

British Columbia (one of 10 Canadian provinces) implemented a carbon tax 6 years ago, their provincial economy has consistenly out-performed most (if not all) of the rest of the provinces despite the conservative government focusing most of it's economic efforts on boosting Alberta's oil export-based economy.

The people who claim mitigating climate change would cripple the economy and bankrupt the world, are the true alarmists and they've been proven wrong at every turn. They claimed we would be bankrupted by anti-acid rain measures, by anti-ozone hole measures, by responsible forestry, by preventing companies from dumping toxic waste into water supplies and everything else that could possibly infringe on their profit margin. Why do you believe them without questions?

It's called a kilt...

As I remember one of the guys lost his job, the other was reprimanded but not fired, and the complainer also lost her job.

There's a lesson there, I think.

Because laws like that so very successful in wiping out Judaism and Christianity, that only know of them through ancient historical texts, right?

First, the Nazis are banned in Germany because it was a political movement that usurped the Nazis murdered 11 million people (and killed another 6 million through warfare), they assassinated their political opponents and allies they didn't trust. You could say that Germany considers it a criminal organization, but that would be an understatement.

Secondly, it was not illegal to be a member of the Klu Klux Klan in July. Although several Florida police officers were fired for being members.

Although the KKK is considered a hate group by the U.S. government, it is not illegal to be a member of the group, and most police departments do not screen for such membership

If something has changed since then, I have not hear anything about it.

As far as I understand that restriction was on "display" of religious symbols and icons in public schools by teachers (and other staff) as part of their separation of church and state laws. If there is a broader law that you wish to cite, you may need to provide a link to the law.