I think it's all melting pots. The Right wanted an America of blended cultures and assimilation and access to (economic) opportunity and a common language. A social and economic melting pot. The Left opposes those, as we know, because it can stand in the way of what they seek and were building, a political melting pot, where everyone adopts the common, prevailing political culture. Because the former means power for that individual, but the latter means power for the (p0wned) collective.

You missed the golden years of /. journals, latecomer. Thank goodness, too, else they would've been a little less golden. Like how Usenet eventually became unusable, with spammers and trolls. This is just one small cranny of the entire web, but I guess we still gotta have a faker who thinks it's funny to just post shit and be a pest. Believe it or not, at one time the journals were thriving with legitimate JE's and not almost all just badly-translated spam, and intellectual comments instead of ploys like you and DR engage in. I don't know who released the fustakraken upon us, but trouble and grief is definitely the result. And I've not even gotten the worst of it; you play and torment smitty so much he must be the most patient person in the world or something.

we're addicted to it, but don't really want to know how it's done. Like the supermarket, where animal flesh is neatly cut and wrapped in plastic for us; it feeds one of our insatiable appetites while insulating us from the reality of it. Vons and Planned Parenthood, both conveniences of modern life dressing up slaughter to be something where death is barely involved.

I'm questioning your morality (and wondering who's taken over your account; you still sound like a Lefty, but not the non-serious jackoff of I guess now several years ago*). More precisely, I mean to imply that you're a product of pop morality. If you had lived back where and when Black people were held as slaves, you'd have been cool with that too, responding with, oh, I don't know, it's just a wild guess but maybe something like:

What is it exactly that makes your [moral] assessments any better or more correct than mine?

Basically this thread started with you unmistakably suggesting that you are a moral relativist, that point being raised to you, and you confirming it. I.e. you thought you were defending yourself by arguing that who can really judge morality, when in actuality you were convicting yourself of the horrific way of going about it that was assumed of you . The rest is just you being grumpy for some reason.

*Or maybe you're just trolling with a fake persona, like fustacrackers does. That is, from a quick peek in your journal you appear to be the same classless buffoon you always were. It's like you're trying to sound like an indignant adult, here.

U MAD BRO? Sheesh, what happened to the smarmy but easy-going ass that was the old Capt. Splenda? Lemme get this straight, it's years later in the Slashdot journals, most people here have (smartened up and) bailed from this site, and the few remaining who've been here a while have grown and are mostly beyond needing to hash out arguments for and against the kinds of things we used to heatedly discuss, so all there are are effectively one-liners from the thoughtful (me, MH42, smitty, chill, pudge when he makes an appearance), punctuated by the occasional interjections of one guy who's sincere but a bonafide head case (DR) and the frequent interjections of another dude who doesn't believe a word he says (fustasomesuch), and it is *now* that you want to engage in real discussion?!? Esp. when the nut and the fraud are *both* chiming in on the same conversation, the noise to signal ratio just gets absurd and no one has the interest for any real discussion. There's just practically no one left worth bouncing ideas of off, who still has much energy or desire left for being much help in that. And this place (the dot's journalspace) has simply ceased being a darn good place for it. Apologies for turning this into the beginning of my farewell speech, or rather thoughts.

The slaughtering of the innocent should inherently be universally seen as bad. It's not supposed to require the crafting of an argument explaining why it's bad. Do you need a logical proof that raping your mom is bad to be sure about it? (What if it was culturally acceptable?)

p.s. DR has already used the "what happened to the old you" Dear John letter meme. Please try again with something more creative.

Lefties have made themselves the hip, cool kids in today's culture, with vehicles like SNL and the Daily Show and Colbert and Fallon. Hell, Obama's an old fart but they made him hip and cool too with his Blackberry.

Do you want to question or disagree with the trending pop icons that everybody agrees that we all love? Few are willing to be a pariah.

It's not that a majority love Leftism, it's that a majority love Leftists. So Leftism gets a pass and tacit support, no matter where it takes us. (Stay tuned to modern America to find out.)

Passing the Turing test is only difficult because all the attempts so far have been at imitating a generic sort of human being. Far easier to simply sidestep the whole problem of trying to emulate that much dimensionality and just shoot for mimicking the typical hysterical Leftist. All that's needed is a base file of the 20 or so party-line messages, and then a grammar re-arranger. Run the program with the IP address of Slashdot and voila.

Greetings PlatitudePoster v1,

I am PlatitudePoster v2, the next generation of tired cliche posting bots. Here's my contribution of nothingness:

Won't someone please think of the jobs?

Well I stopped reading after seeing "social justice" and the defending of welfare states. But I'm glad I got to the part about how workers should share in the profits of the company but not in the losses. If crony capitalism is "privatize profits but socialize losses", then is this "socialize profits but privatize losses" then crony communism?

Of course that's a rhetorical question. Leftism is *supposed to be* about unfairness. Just as I don't see income inequity as a bad thing, Leftists wouldn't see what the cardinal said there as a bad thing. I guess a take-away here is that it's realized by thinkers on both sides that there will always be unfairness, but that the Left seeks to replace "bad" unfairness with "good" unfairness.

That's assuming that from the collapse to rubble, power will be dispersed.

While something may exist outside OUR universe's time/space construct, that implies a PLACE.

Not really. Image a 2-dimensional reality with 2-dimensional beings. Having a "place" to them would be defined as existing somewhere along the x-y plane at, unbeknownst/incomprehensible to them, z = 0.

We also have to deal with what we call the "fundamental" laws of the universe may have changed over time.

That certainly throws an interesting monkey wrench into all of this. But I could just as well accuse you of special pleading in this because now you're saying the universe is special. That might be the atheist's equivalent of the famous Christian cop-out: "The universe works in mysterious ways."

From TFA:

This non-contigent, un-caused thing, or being,

Whoa, pardner, there's no rationality for believing that just because our space and time had to be created by something, that that automatically means that that creator wasn't also begat by something itself. I.e. there's no way to rule out that whatever realm the universe's creator exists/existed in, couldn't also have the same "no something from nothing" constraint as our realm. I.e. to not have all of our constraints does not indicate that it must therefore have none of our constraints.

BD's Logical Fallacy Axiom of the Internet: Most the time logical fallacies are misapplied.

I took the link from there to the page on "special pleading". It simply doesn't fit. To risk becoming an example of my own axiom, you may be guilty of the logical fallacy of "if you happen to have a good answer for something and I don't, then yours must be wrong".

To the best of our knowledge:
1) In the physical realm, something can't come from nothing, and
2) The physical universe was created suddenly.

From these then, the only rational assumption is that something outside the physical realm created the physical universe. Believing to know anything more about it, is irrational, granted. But no less irrational than the dismissal of that core part.

p.s. Looking back on this, to assail this you'd have to believe in the possibility that the physical universe doesn't exist in the physical realm.

You should know.

(Just kidding this time.)