According to Walter Williams, it's obvious: it's because we're making decisions for everybody instead of letting people be free. Thus, when one's preferences win out, it's necessarily at the expense of someone else who doesn't share those preferences. Of course they fight, bitterly.

The solution is to get government out of these decisions. Eliminate the political machinery that has the power to control these things, and then people will quit fighting for control of it.

And it's affecting arcade restoration and emulation cabinet building.

Do Nuclear Weapons Deter?

The first part of this article is very interesting, as he proposes a chain of logic that he asserts proves that ownership of nuclear weapons is not actually a deterrent to attacks by enemies. I'm not quite able to wrap my head around the logic, yet, and I'm not sure I agree. But it's an interesting thought, and I think I'll be revisiting it.

Then he gets to the point where he mentions "market anarchism." After that point the reasoning gets really weird, and I'm saying that as a market anarchist, myself. I'm sure it's even weirder to those who aren't. :) Some leftist pacifists might agree with and like his conclusions, though.

Private war is waged only when absolutely necessary; consumers would rather spend their money on new cars and clothing rather than on propping up foreign dictatorships and nation building. People fight only when absolutely necessary.

I've had the Slashdot 10 hot comments slashbox on my page since the year I started using Slashdot (wow; that would be 2001, I think). Now I've built an RSS feed to pull links to the comments into Google reader.

Ron Paul wants to permit heroin use in public schools.

I really liked this quote:

I had a vague feeling along those lines when I first heard this story (and being disconnected from most major media I heard the story nearly 24 hours late and have only heard about one update a day since then), but I couldn't elucidate it.

Source: http://www.mises.org/story/2668

This page just told me "This page cannot be displayed because ad blocking software has been detected." Cute. I guess I just won't bother reading, then.

Or I'll turn off Javascript, or I'll use wget and/or lynx.

As we all learned in this discussion, no biological research can take place without accepting evolution.

Unless you count this family, who have beliefs fairly similar to mine.

One counterexample provided. One false premise refuted.

Of course, the truth is that the other side wasn't using the same definition of "evolution" which was explicitly verbally provided at the beginning of the discussion.

(And, yeah, I'm not classing running somebody's distributed computing client as full-blown "research." I'm just saying it's clear you don't have to accept evolutionary origins in order to understand the progress of biological science.

It's a little bit morbid, but I've been scraping Wikipedia to create a feed that gives me names of the recently deceased.

The slashdot comment feeds I provide (also here) have been updated to use https URLs. For subscribers, this means they will get to slashdot through https. Non-subscribers should be transparently redirected to plain old http, at least if my one test through IE where I wasn't logged in is any indication.

Meanwhile, it looks like this means the most recent 24 posts will go through each feed again, as they now have different URLs and thus appear to be new items. Hiccup! :)

Wow: 7-7-7 already. Seems like just a year ago it was 6-6-6.

Of course, 07-07-07 is really 2007-07-07, so there's no actual significance to it, but at least all the people who don't know the real way to write dates will have one day when they won't confuse each other by writing them different ways.

Hey, you gotta fight our war, Boy!

In conjunction with my Slashdot comment feeds, now I have a feed for CmdrTaco's comments:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/slashdot/Cmdrtaco

The idea that people "need" to be taught evolutionary origins is nothing but petty bigotry.

The rationale for this mind-control and enslavement is the idea that people who believe in creationism are irrational and therefore incapable of making a positive contribution to the great "we" -- society. I note that this assumes two things: that creationism is irrational (I'll grant that many folks think this is proved, not assumed), and that there is some objective standard of how human lives should be spent contributing to society, some standard which says that a life spent one way is "right" while another way is "wrong," measuring according to some metric that I can't fathom about what's "best" for "all" (for sufficient values of "all" that actually, as far as I can see, actually translate to "some").

So let me give you those two points for the moment. I'm going to tentatively agree that creationism is irrational and that it is important to make sure that everyone is rational so that they can "contribute" to "society" or whatever the heck it is you hope to achieve out of having everyone aware of evolution.

Here's what you're missing: nobody is 100% rational, 100% of the time, on 100% of issues. It's not necessary for everybody to understand every piece of truth in order to function productively.

A lot of smoke is blown about how if kids aren't taught evolution they won't be able to be scientifically productive. Horse manure. It ain't so. You can have wrong ideas about what happened 7000 years ago, or 4.5 billion years ago, and still think quite rationally and scientifically about other things.

There's not a lick of evidence provided for the idea that kids need to be taught evolution in order to grow up capable of making a positive contribution to their society or their country. It's something we're just supposed to accept because men of bigoted faith like Richard Dawkins say so. And I'm not willing to see people enslaved (have their freedom taken away in the form of being forced to submit to compulsory reeducation of ideas their parents quite legally believed) just because Richard Dawkins is a bigot.

When I was in first grade my teachers encouraged other students to make fun of me and shame me because I couldn't crayon within the lines of coloring pages. This was cruel abuse, but I realize now it's symptomatic. School is systematically teaching the values we vote on, and today it's created a society that ridicules and shames people of faith, with the bigoted idea that they are 100% irrational.

Speaking of which, this is why I think a school system that is run by democracy is bound to failure. We could vote to teach everyone evolution, but we could just as well vote to teach them the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We could vote to teach everyone that homosexuality is acceptable, or we could vote to teach that such people should be stoned. If you really want your kids to be educated according to the consensus of scientists, then the absolute last thing that you should want is to have them in an educational institution run by a democracy.

(This is also a large part of why I won't vote. Remember when you're casting your vote next year in November about who is going to be my tyrant and king for the next four years and overrule the free choices of me and my children -- that I will not be making any such choice for you. I would never treat you that way.)