What You Can't Say 1999
dtolton writes "Paul Graham has an excellent article posted on the subject of things you can't say. His article explores what ideas are generally considered heresy, and whether or not those ideas might be true nonetheless. He also presents advice for handling heretical ideas. Considering that many of the ideas in technology in general and Open Source specifically are near heresy, it's well worth a read."
Re:gnaa rules trollkore drools (Score:-1, Insightful)
This is probably the one thread where the GNAA posts are ON topic.
Proud to be a Heretic! (Score:3, Insightful)
Back to my point, such places no longer exist, and while
I like my free speech, and here is one of the only places I can be the heretic that I am, and not suffer unduly for it.
Soluzar __PROUD HERETIC SINCE THE EARLY EIGHTIES__
ObDisclaimer: My heresy doesn't extend to thinking I'm a God, or wanting to sacrifice people to one, so please don't take that to mean I'm a dangerous looney.
change (Score:2, Insightful)
The first 15 posts on this are things you cant say (Score:4, Insightful)
My favorite example is why some African-Americans can & do use the term "nigger" to describe themselves without inpunity or shame, but if a white person does so, they can/will be fired and their lives ruined. Why is it a double standard, and it's a negative hateful word. Why do blacks in certain circles constantly use it?
(and there's no need to mod me down for *actually* saying things you cant say - if thats the case then /. is worthless.)
A Troll Manifesto? (Score:3, Insightful)
He uses Galileo as an example as an example of someone who expressed unfashionable ideas. But Galileo was starting a new fashion. He popularized and provided evidence for a new truth of which the world was unaware and generally unprepared to accept.
The difference between Galileo's writings and an unfashionable idea is that Galileo expressed a TRUE statement. Many unfashionable statements are unfashionable precisely because they are wrong.
There's a time and place for non-conformism, and this isn't it.
Re:Proud to be a Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
Since your uid is about half of mine, I guess I can't call you a n00b. However, this is pretty much the opposite of my experience with Slashdot.
There are all kinds of sacred cows here, that you criticize at your peril: the effectiveness of Linux, the evil of copyright in general and the recording industry in particular; the lack of merit to SCO's lawsuit
Outside commentators (such as those from Forbes) have referred to Slashdot and like sites as "echo chambers", where the same ideas bounce around ad infinitum. For example, just look at any article critical of Linux and you will see that every response is basically the same, and that high moderation is given to anything that restores the proper groupthink. I wonder if this is because a certain type of person is attracted to Slashdot, or if Slashdot transforms people's opinions? Perhaps a little of both.
I think this is one of the ironies of internet communication -- in an environment which supposedly promotes universal communication, people only seem to communicate in enclaves of like minds, reinforcing each other's narrow world views.
Uh oh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:1, Insightful)
2. I think genocide is the wrong word, but the war on drugs as is stands today is definitely a very bad thing and hurts far more people than it helps.
3. Feminism is a good thing though! It's anti-male-ism, reverse discrimination, and political correctness that are hurting us.
A quick list (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant (Score:5, Insightful)
* I refuse to put a disclaimer on this message. I feel that the continued use of that word by black culture is absolutely sickening. I am white.
Why a warning ? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is after-all a site for "stuff that matters". What the author is trying to express is that blind obedience to society norms is a bad thing. Effectively, he's saying "distrust Authority", an old maxim, but one that needs reiteration from time to time.
I have to say that I identify closely with a lot of his ideas, nothing depresses me more than the continued conversion of people into "consumers" told what to "consume", when to do it, how much to do it, and presumably when to stop.
The only way out of the cycle is education - but not facts and figures, instead the freedom to think and postulate, debate and conclude. The sort of education that we (at least in the UK) tend to reserve for the 18+ year-olds who go to college.
We live in an ever-more complex society, with ever-more subtle distinction between right and wrong, between do and do-not. It is a crying shame that most are incapable of distinguishing those distinctions. The "system" has failed these people.
I wonder if we are indeed moving into the "Corporate state" governmental model (anyone who played 'elite' will know that these are the most stable of governments), which simply exist to exist. Life should be more
Simon.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant (Score:5, Insightful)
Same reason your wife can say "I am so fat", but you get in trouble if you say "honey, you are fat". I don't see why that is so hard to understand why the difference.
Sadly, universities have the least free speech.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want detailed specifics check out the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education [thefire.org].
Brian Ellenberger
politically correct (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In defense of -ist and -ic (Score:2, Insightful)
1) The failure of speakers/writers to state in explicit terms exactly what they mean.
2) The failure of listeners/readers to think about the possible meanings of an even moderately vague statement.
There are all sorts of reasons for both of those tendencies, including intellectual laziness on both sides, a desire to inflame on both sides, the speaker's desire to be able to backtrack, the listener's desire to get ticked off, and so on.
I tend to agree with your analysis, but would add that -ism and -ist type words are too often used as the trump word to end a conversation -- once those kind of words have been used on you, you can't really continue. I've seen many conversations turn into a race to get to the trump word.
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Can say Vs. Correct (Score:5, Insightful)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", as Voltaire may have said - and equally, just because it has been said, doesn't mean anyone has to listen. That includes listening to the conspiracy-theorists who will no doubt be having a field-day here all evening...
-Chris
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:5, Insightful)
2) I know a lot of people who are openly outspoken against the war on drugs, including myself. But genocide has a very specific meaning: The eradication of a selected group of people. Who is this group of people the war on drugs is intended to wipe out, and how is it being accomplished?
3) If Rush Limbaugh is saying it, and 20 million Americans are nodding their heads in unison, it's not really unsayable, is it?
Unpopular opinions aren't the same as heresies. Dig deeper. You have to have others.
Re:politically correct (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, maybe that means I'm just a contrarian git.
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Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:1, Insightful)
Try instead pointing out anything suggesting even slightest that pedophiles are really human beings after all.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant (Score:3, Insightful)
"My favorite example is why some African-Americans can & do use the term "nigger" to describe themselves without inpunity or shame, but if a white person does so, they can/will be fired and their lives ruined."
If it puts his job on the line for using the phrase, yet it doesn't put other people's jobs on the line then it very much IS reverse descrimination. I admit it depends on the context it's used, but it's nevertheless a valid point.
Anyway, you dear sir are a fool for using that word.
Yes, but the problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, in any bar you'll find some middle aged white guy who will try to tell you "The problem with this country is the blacks/asians/jews/hispanics, but you can't say that anymore because of political correctness". There's nothing *original* about such ideas -- when such guys were young those were typical opinions.
Re:Proud to be a Heretic! (Score:3, Insightful)
Too often, forums are just a means of preaching to the choir, and if you disagree then you are branded the heretic.
But there are discussions here where both sides do make decent points, I mean you have people that will never buy an Apple product, those seem to only buy Apple, and those between.
And people do share conflicting experiences on a certain product or idea.
Re:Proud to be a Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, if you consider being flamed/modded down "peril", you really ought to get out more.
Now, I don't know what you're talking about. In every story, I see a wide range of opinions, usually modded up based on merit. I've seen plenty of +5 pro-Microsoft posts that simply made good points.
On children and swearing (Score:5, Insightful)
Implication: he doesn't yet have kids.
"...and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent. [7]"
Nonsense. There's a saying I know from a film, don't know if it has any other derivation, "rules are for the obeyance of fools and the guidance of the wise". In this context, the children are (figuratively) the 'fools' - they haven't yet gained enough wisdom to know the implications of what they're saying. If they have, well then they're old enough to use the words. If they haven't...they're still the children being referred to.
I have two children, one just months but the other coming up to her second birthday and with her use of language exploding all over the place. She doesn't yet know enough to check herself, has little conception of context - if she starting using swear words now honestly, would I have done that kid a favour? At some point in her life she's going to start swearing, but at two? No. She'll do so when she learns about them, at first way too much and then later with a bit more understanding of context. And that's why the parents are self-censoring themselves - to help their children, not to molly-coddle them from reality.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:A Troll Manifesto? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh oh (Score:5, Insightful)
Equally stupid are those that think that because they "think outside the box" that they are automatically correct.
Paul Graham is emphasizing the need to be open-minded, but he is ignoring the need to be "active-minded". If your "outside the box" idea have failed the test, they need to be rejected.
Re:Nudity harms children (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In defense of -ist and -ic (Score:4, Insightful)
Criticize Isreal - anti-semtic
Criticize Blacks - racist
Criticize Women - misogynist
US - Un-American
I'm sure you know others.
Even when a person belongs to one of these groups, folks who do not agree with his/her/its opinion will get labeled as such.
Re:Proud to be a Heretic! (Score:3, Insightful)
Things you can't say, hmm? Ironic that this should be slashdotted, since
On another note, I thought the theme of article was interesting, but not all the ideas were fully thought through. For example:
That's a rather tenuous conclusion. Actually, the reason we shelter our children is that they are not mature enough to understand discretion. E.g. I wouldn't care if my kids learned the words "fuck" and "shit", but they don't have the discretion not to use them in church.
-a
Re:Nudity harms children (Score:5, Insightful)
Not nudity - sexuality. And the reasons are part moral choice but mostly practical. Children are inquisitive and will copy much of what they see. However, they are children, not miniature adults. Morally, they do not yet possess emotional complexity of the kind required to handle sex. Practically, they are unable to handle the consequences of being pregnant by twelve.
I have kids, and it's an amazing learning experience. Forget programming, debugging humans is where it's at. From your post I am guessing that you aren't yet in this situation - please correct me if I'm wrong. However, I humbly suggest to you that the kind of lessons you learn after having kids are only available through experience. The me of three years ago knew far less about reasoning such as the kind you're describing than the me of today does.
Cheers,
Ian
Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Things like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:5, Insightful)
About feminism:
Feminism was once needed, back in a time when 50% of the population's potential was stiffled from birth, being a woman meant that you couldn't do many things simply because you were a woman, and not because you actually couldn't do them. No woman doctors, no woman mathematicians, etc.
That was bad, feminism fought that, and that was good.
But since feminism reached its goals (enjoy that voting and education girls), feminism has stagnated and has decayed into nothing more than a form of sexism.
Now feminist dogma is that men are evil, that every "macho" characteristic are bad. And it both enforces unrealistic feminisation of men and masculinisation of women.
Re:Ah, the power of heresy! (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I think your points are interesting, though I do not agree with them
our consciousness, our imaginations, our creations: all these are simply manifestations of our genetically-implanted instincts for survival
Except, that most of those are not genetical, because really most of our minds is formed by personal experience. Genes just build up the CPU, but it is really life experience and internal/external feedback loops that actually creates our software. And because it is software, we are so incredibly flexible, can learn new things, adapt and evolve beyond genetic evolution. This is an important concept that started with mammals, I believe. It's all in the software!
There is no other reason for existence, no god, no destiny, no karma. / We simply operate, like the very intelligent automatons we are.
Some religions argue that searching for The Reason *is* the reason for your life. As an atheist, I'm inclined to agree. As higher lifeforms, we are free to find and set a reason for our individual lifes. Lower lifeforms are more genetically "pre-configured", for them the highest form of self-determination is their personality: a set of likes and dislikes. Even for them, life is more than mere existance! All lifeforms with decent brainpower (including us) are not simply intelligent automatons, they just live *inside* intelligent automatons.
Men solve technical problems, women organize social networks. Young men learn and work, young women dance and like to look pretty.
Yeah well, the jury is still out on that one, because humans are so incredibly programmable it is kina hard to distinguish between genetic presets and social indoctrination. What we do know is, however, that men and women are not *that* different in many aspects as traditionalists would have you believe. Even the old hunter-gatherer theories are just an awkward example that uses an image of a certain culture (which may or may not have existed) to drive home points in favor of large genetic presets. But human history has shown way to much diversity in cultures to argue in favor of the archetypical "stoneage" society as the one that is pre-programmed into our genes.
While we're at it, consider also that most societies are based on raw muscle power to determine rank, which kind of forces women to the lower (more house-wifey) roles because they lack that muscle strength to assume rank. This however does say nothing about female capabilities or preferences themselves, it just says something about what role men have in store for "inferior" ranking society members.
Just because you understand fluid mechanics does not mean you cannot enjoy surfing a great wave.
Exactly, but also recognize that knowing "fluid mechanics" is just the first step. Basically we (individually and as a society) can be anything we want and can set our own goals and reasons. Isn't that a cool thing?
not the same at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Proud to be a Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
My uid is 1/10th his, and I'll call him a n00b.
You're absolutely right. Slashdot is a bastion defense for a wide array of sacred cows, many of which you mention, and slashdot is largely an echo chamber where people can go to pat themselves on the back for thinking they are smart.
This article by Paul Graham says this at one point, "Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. "
The interesting thing about group think is that any slightly differing opinion is "really wrong", and therefore not worth listening to or properly rebutting. It's a fascinating world, where people pat themselves on the back for being open minded and adopting a new fashion, but at the same time ignore or deflect any criticism of their position.
Graham talks about this as he goes on to say, "But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite."
It's an interesting article, and I definately agree with your last sentence...
"I think this is one of the ironies of internet communication -- in an environment which supposedly promotes universal communication, people only seem to communicate in enclaves of like minds, reinforcing each other's narrow world views."
I follow a number of political websites in addition to tech, and I'm finding the internet is really doing more to polarize society than anything else. It's allowing people who might otherwise be exposed to various opinions within their communities, to find like minded people on the internet and commiserate.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing. One just has to remember to keep it in perspective.
Spammers are the "communists" of Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
But when the subject is spam, the presumption of innocence, even humanity, goes out the window.
Spammers lie. Spammers are stupid (well, how do they make all that money, then?) Spammers don't deserve human rights. Hell, Carnivore (DCS-1000) would be embraced with open arms on Slashdot if it were targetted at spammers.
Maybe we should hate spammers that much. They really do a lot of damage. Maybe our visceral "spammer witch hunt" attitude is justified.
Now you know how McCarthy felt about communists, and how Bush feels about terrorists. And unlike spammers, communists and terrorists have killed 10^7 and 10^4 people, respectively.
Re:A quick list (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Nudity harms children (Score:3, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, when I was a child my family was quite open about nudity. It didn't really bother any of us to see other family members naked, which was quite normal getting ready for work/school in the morning. This surprised some of my other friends years later to hear this, who had never seen their parents naked apparently.
This actually really messed with my sense of privacy, so the open minded 70s atmosphere backfired. Taboos don't exist solely as a property of close-mindedness, its just an acknowlegement of the present state of the culture. I didn't gain anything by being open about nudity in my childhood, and was actually hurt developmentally by it. Societal laws may be completely arbitrary and self-perpetuating, but the consequences of working against them are as real as ignoring natural laws. Not because it's "wrong" in any objective sense, but because you are fighting the current.
Based on my personal experience, I don't believe that nudity is very compatible with the american culture, which is why the taboo exists. I don't think it would be the end of the world if we practiced postmortem cannibalism here in the USA, but it would be directly incompatible with at least four major religions, so the fact that it can't objectively harm anyone is irrelevant in the face of the fact that it would be massively culturally disruptive.
Fighting Taboos seem to be based on the idea that culture doesn't matter because it's arbitrary, which is distinctly the impression I got from Graham's article. I believe it does matter.
Just my two cents.
Fact vs. Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Oddly enough, the less realistic a truth is, the more likely a person is to get upset at someone who is contradicting it. Look at anybody in history who has been burned, fired, hanged, or crucified for stating a truth, and you'll see what I mean.
While you're at it, you might notice that attempting to repeal laws which support certain popular truths is tantamount to breaking those laws in most people's eyes. Gives you something to chew on, eh?
1) 2) 3) (Score:3, Insightful)
What is unclear is how much Israel knew about the attacks from their intelligence sources. Then again it is widely known and reported, at least in europe, that the US itself knew an awfull lot about the planning of the attack. They had received warnings from US citizens, from their own analyst and from foreign countries that something involving hijacked aircraft was going to take place. FBI/CIA even investigated reports of muslims taking flying lessons and not being intrested in learning to land.
However it is not in the current US goverments intrest to tell the public that they knew everything they needed to know and simply refused to act. This would A stop the introduction of new laws and B raise questions why they didn't act and exactly what connection does Bush have with Bin Laden (hint look at companies wich Bush junior has an intrest in and see wich family also has an intrest in the same company).
Blaming Israel for CIA/FBI failures is however a lot easier for a certain kind of people who always need a scapegoat. 2) the war on drugs is one way of dealing with drugs. I live in holland where we have a different approach. Maybe it is better for the drug users. For the average non-drug using person it makes little difference. You get crack addicts breaking into cars. So do we. We spend a lot on wellfare to keep the drug users alive. You spend a lot on prisons. Our cops don't have enough right and manpower to do effective policing, yours are to busy with a kid who has a joint. If you really care move to a different country. 3) Watch some Japanese tv. Then compare those attitudes with your own. That was what the west was like before feminism. Rape of women and childeren punished less then stealing from the company. Women harrased at the office. Most people who anti feminist are people who are very selfish. They don't need it so neither does anyone else.
Just imagine you are a female or that the person is your daughter.
Hitler was probably very charming (Score:1, Insightful)
I said "Adolf Hitler".
That got everyone's attention. :-)
I explained that here was a guy who committed huge crimes, that required the cooperation of thousands of people, and he almost got away with it. He must have been very charismatic or persuasive to get so far, and so would probably make a fascinating one-time dinner companion.
That wasn't the only controversial answer I gave on that panel. The prosecutor asked us what we would tell alien visitors who asked us to explain this "drug problem" they had heard of. I said that I would tell them how drugs like marijuana and LSD are fun, safe when used correctly, and much less harmful than the legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, and that because we lie about drugs to kids, they learn not to trust us, so when we do tell the truth, about things like crack, they don't believe us. I also gave her a nice flame about how we waste the taxpayers money prosecuting small time drug dealers who aren't hurting anyone, when we let drunk drivers have a free murder before we do anything about them.
Since this was a small time drug dealer case, and I was dressed in hippy-mode, and the defense attorney looked like a hippy in "hippy wearing a suit" mode, and I had basically called the prosecutor a worthless waste of taxpayer dollars, I was pretty sure the prosecutor was going to use a peremptory challenge to remove me, but as they alternated using their 3 challenges each, it was the defense, on his third challenge, that removed me.
Re:A few more modern taboos: (Score:3, Insightful)
You missed the most obvious answer to the question: Jews didn't always become powerful in every country to which they have moved. Sometimes the questions you are asked to answer make unwarranted assumptions.
This guy's not as sharp... (Score:2, Insightful)
"In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong."
What a load of BS. If we disagree with the past in physics it's because our theories better fit the currently available data than the theories of the past. Doesn't mean we're right, something physicists often seem to forget.
"It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics"
Huh? Is this from a case study or his own prejudices and unquestioned acceptance of a 'fashionable' nerd belief: You have to be smarter to be in sciences than in humanities. I bet he doesn't know a single professor of French literature, or a thing about it; especially the details of studies at a doctoral level.
For someone advocating clarity and open-mindedness he's rushing to a lot of conclusions. He seems to think that nerds and scientists are somehow more inclined to precise critical thought and openmindedness than others while at the same time demonstrating the contrary.
No one's said it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I haven't been threatened with losing my job for that. Nope, no heresy, there.
Bull... (Score:3, Insightful)
Humour (Score:2, Insightful)
Comedians talk about the (wrongness of) war in iraq these days.
They used to make a lot of gay jokes, but now it's become more acceptable to be gay and gay jokes have become taboo.
Racist jokes before that, when racism was more of an issue.
I've noticed people laugh most at what is most taboo. These are usually issues in society that need addressing.
Re:A quick list (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just the atheist. Announcing that you actually believe in a religion, whatever it may be as long as its not currently fashionable, can lead to a lot of eyebrow-raising too. The only "acceptable" choice right now seems to be to be an agnostic...
Re:Nudity harms children (Score:3, Insightful)
I worry about too much nudity in the culture at large because the nudity portrayed is almost always sexual--or worse yet, is combined somehow with violence. That can be "too much information" for the young child trying to sort things out. From that standpoint, I believe it can actually interfere with the child's development of his or her own sexuality--a long, slow process that begins almost at birth and hopefully continues until they plant us under the sod.
I guess I've been around enough children that I've subscribed to the Freudian theory of latency--a time between five and puberty when the focus on sex goes into the background as the child works on the huge number of developmental tasks he/she needs to master to become an adult.
Cultural mileage may vary. On some warm, sunny atoll in the Pacific where everybody bares all, nudity may not be that big a deal. But a lot of other mores and taboos may be in place instead.
Respect for the developing child is paramount, and I find it sadly lacking at this time.
Anne
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:2, Insightful)
1. I know nothing about this. Though, somehow, I get the feeling that if someone from the future were to come back in time, he would know this idea to be crazy. Just a gut feeling.
2. I know just as many white people as I do black people and mexican people who have been picked up by the law for drug related issues. The law is not at all partial to any ethnicity. I believe that any statistics showing a higher police pickup rate on minorities probably coincides with statistics showing higher use rates in minorities.
3. I do not believe men and women are completely equal physically and mentally by nature. However, there are women who can physically do what men can do. There are men who can raise a child just as well as a woman can. In both cases, there are men and women who can not reach the standards of the other gender. As far as the military goes, if a woman can prove she can do physically and mentally what is required of a man, let her in. As far as law goes, if a couple divorces, the law should not be partial to the mother if the father shows he can do exactly as well as she can.
Re:A few more modern taboos: (Score:2, Insightful)
However, in a more-or-less free society they (as does any other immigrant group with the right attitude) do seem to profit and find their way disproportionately (for their percentage in the population) into the professions in particular. The professions are profitable, money talks, and so on.
This is a stratagem to be emulated, not feared.
-------
Um, no.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Things like... (Score:3, Insightful)
they can do whatever they want, and so can you (Score:2, Insightful)
Furthermore, you have a choice in universities. If Berkeley restricts your speech too much, just attend some other school. There are plenty of schools that cater to whatever bizarre philosophies you espouse: Christian, racially pure, extremely right wing, libertarian, you name it. Of course, those schools are also the ones that aren't very highly regarded, and that's no coincidence.
If you want to attend Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc., you have to put up with their culture. It's your choice.
Re:A quick list (Score:2, Insightful)
Western society had centuries of religious suppression from the Catholic church. And that religion says that only God (and, ofcourse, the power hungry dictators who controlled the church) can decide when you should die.
By commiting suicide you take away some of Gods power.
*why* you can't say things (Score:4, Insightful)
> *IS NOT NORMAL*
> *your weird way*
> *crackpot parents*
> *offensive to me*
ah but there's a world of a difference between a crackpot yelling at the world and thoughtful discussion of serious topics. All it takes is a few cranks arguing this way and everyone that follows looses their credibility!
Re:I wish... (Score:3, Insightful)
A creeping diseased meme disfunctionally behind the times and out of all sync with reality seems to be sweeping through web designers of the world (excepting
EVERYONE DOES NOT HAVE THEIR DISPLAY SET TO 800x600.
In fact, I would argue that the majority of people are browsing at 1024x768 or greater and THEY are the people who should be targeted for browser optimization. See: http://www.dreamink.com/design5.shtml If the resulting text looks large on an 800x600 screen -- tough. At least it is legible to them.
Thank Cthulhu Mozilla has a "minimum font" setting to bump stuff up to legibility without setting the whole page to a zoom magnification. But why should I have to defensively do this to protect myself against web designer stupidity?
There! I said it and, gosh, I feel better! Great topic.
Human evolution != taboo (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, sadly, the topic has forever been tainted by the spectre of genocide/eugenics/colonialism, but more important, some discussions of this topic will be based on VERY shaky data. For example, as far as I know, there are NO un-culturally-biased data comparing intelligence, simply because all intelligence tests are culturally biased. "Races" of humans are so similar in most ways that they are really only different-LOOKING.
There are some genetic disease frequency differences, and I don't think any black person is going to call you a racist for saying that the sickle-cell anemia trait evolved in Africans to help protect them from malaria (an African disease).
Nobody's going to dispute that on the average, Tutsis are taller than Hutus, possibly through centuries of sexual selection where one group thought short was sexy and the other that tall was. There's some Darwinism for you.
It's once you start making culturally-biased arguments about race and inherent ability that people get offended. What do I mean by "culturally-biased"? Well, a crude example is an IQ test which asks you to pick the odd one out from a group of objects: a cup, a bottle, a plate and a hollow gourd with the neck cut off...
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:3, Insightful)
your genocide explanation is even worse; the war on drugs clearly doesn't fall within the definition of genocide in the particular US statute you cite (although this is hardly *the* legal definition of genocide).
Re:G. W. Bush should be tried for his war crimes.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Attacking another country is not a warcrime, but an act of war. A war crime is slightly different, like gassing Khurds... But You knew that already.
Thank you... (Score:4, Insightful)
First, none of the things that 'Bob Robertson' said are heresies anymore - they're all neo-conservative dogma.
'Mark' wasn't trying to censor him, he was just saying, pretty much flat-out, that 'Bob' was wrong. Which is pretty much what Paul Graham is saying - if you're just calling something incorrect, that's fine. It's when you start inventing labels for it (like, for instance, neo-conservative... ;) ) and using just the labels, and not addressing why or what is wrong, that you have left the path of wisdom.
Re:Better examples of heresy I can think of (Score:3, Insightful)
Are they really? I'm not sure how you can substantiate the claim that Arabs, Indians, et al. originated from the Caucasus Mountain region. There is evidence that many European Jews are descended from the Khazar tribes of the Caucasus, but the original Israelites/Hebrews were a Semitic people, as are the Arabs.
I'm not sure how you're using the term "Caucasian," but it properly refers only to the inhabitants of the Caucasus region. Its usage to designate a broader racial classification stems from the (thoroughly discredited) racial theories of eighteenth-century German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, though this usage has persisted in the vernacular, particularly in America. Perhaps you who are so smart would like to share with us poor unlearned souls exactly what the necessary and sufficient conditions of being Caucasian are, according to your definition?
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:5, Insightful)
This goes back to one of my old arguments about probable and possible. You're not doing the filtering to deselect the probable out of the possible grouping.
And it's not like I'm a big fan of Ariel Sharon or the neocons controlling the White House either. I think there was a horrible failure of analyzing intelligence leading up to 9/11, the focus wasn't in the right place. I said it back then, that the Bush administration, despite warnings from the CIA, was more focused on the least probable risk(rogue nations with ICBMs) versus the most likely risk.(someone sending a bomb via FedEx or some other common every day thing, like an airplane)
So my views are already semi-favorable to your cause, and I still doubt your claims without more solid evidence.
Hell, there's stronger evidence that the Bush family planned the Reagan assassination than what you have linking Israel to 9/11, and I don't believe that was anything other than a coincidence.
Re:Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain . . (Score:2, Insightful)
There, how'd I do?
Very well, I'd say.
I'm getting pretty sick and tired of Java weenines at my workplace writing 6000 Java classes to do something that would take about 10 lines of Perl.
Re:Two things you can't say (Score:2, Insightful)
Scary thing about what you just said is that many people will lable you a racist for simply saying it. If you held an academic position, even tenured, you could be terminated for simply pointing out these differences. Never mind the fact that your statement was not racist in nature.
Racism (n) - the belief that any one particular race, as a whole, is superior to another race.
Re:Two things you can't say (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems like I hear a lot of people complaining about sex equality--but most everything I hear is characterized by a group that's opposed to the viewpoint. For example, I hear a lot of people decrying the "liberal" opinion that men and women are equal in every way, but I also hear very few liberals actually making that statement. At the same time, I hear people damning the "conservatives" who insist that a woman's place is in the home, taking care of the children. Likewise, I don't hear a lot of conservatives (outside of the odd AM talk radio show) who seem that vehement about this idea.
I think it's pretty well established that, in general, women and men have some different skills in addition to a fairly large, common pool of skills. I also think it's true, however, that very few individual people compare very well to stereotypes. To me, the most visible conflict between the sexes is whether or not women and men get paid equally for doing the same kind of work at the same level of skill. I don't think a person's sex should matter in determining his or her rate of pay (indeed, in the U.S., this type of discrimination was made illegal in 1975), but it still does matter, sometimes. I think most of us would agree with the idea of equal pay? I'm not sure most of us would agree that it's still a problem.
I guess the other big controversy I see is in women's roles in the military. We don't let women do things like crew submarines or fly combat jets in battle. Knowing next to nothing about the military, I can't argue with any degree of authority. But I know what my instincts say.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:5, Insightful)
You can say anything you want to. But you should be prepared to back it up. Carl Sagan once said something like "Extraordinary ideas require extraordinary proof". If you could reference specific repudable works (not just general things), we might believe you. Ignoring facts is one thing. But if you have quite a bit of stuff, and nothing to back it up, there isn't any reason why we should believe you. It's not simply pointing and yelling "heresy", it's saying "you have a claim that most people would ignore and laugh at, but if you can show us some proof, we'll look at it" Also, just becuase you think you have proof, it doesn't mean we'll believe it.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, no, that would be just plain old "discrimination." "Reverse discrimination" presumes that the people who are normally discriminated against are the ones doing the discriminating, i.e., that his black superior would be the one threatening to fire him. In the overwhelming majority of tech environments, this is not the case.
In any event, is there any substantiation whatsoever that this really happens, that blacks are traipsing around AT WORK using "nigger" to describe themselves while whites are cowering in fear of being fired for doing the same? Or are we just all going, "Umm-hmm, it happened to Eminem -- it must happen all the time!"
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:3, Insightful)
How?
I'm willing to bet that this is a political view with little evidence in any sienticfic work.
Old republicans have mumbled about this since the depression; how "women taking a second job will destroy the country" and "feminism will lead to weaker children", and it boils down to nothing.
Re:Things like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a good orator (or being convincing in some medium) is necessary for doing anything on a large scale. Of course Hitler was a fantastic orator. If he weren't, he couldn't have caused much trouble.
Re:Proud to be a Heretic! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, on the contrary. The side that has to fight harder to be heard benefits more in the long run. (If they continue to exist as a group in the long run...)
Re:WAS JESUS A GAY NIGGER? YES HE WAS! (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't the whole point here to discuss what is un-discussable? Did the moderator actually read the article? Or even the post topic?
Perhaps it is stated in offensive terms, but it puts forth a reasonable proposition, and one that can't be known to be untrue by secular means of truth seeking. In fact there is considerable evidence in a secular sense the it is true.
I had expected better from the Slashdot crowd in general, and especially the moderators.
Hopefully this will be meta-moderated unfair.
This article is about fear, and how to deal with this fear and discuss important ideas in light of pillorying that come from their discussion. I rarely use the word "nigger," I have no need to use it, but now I feel I must use it to dis-empower it. Nigger, nigger, nigger.
I've noted that western media have labeled Osama Bin Laden a monster not only for orchestrating 9-11 but for having more than one wife, one of whom was something like 13 at the time of marriage. Multiple wives and age of consent are social constructs and say nothing about their actual true moral content. But because we believe killing thousands of people is immoral, we can strengthen our belief the other two practices are evil as well.
The Nazis believed in eugenics. Therefor any discussion of forced sterilization of mentally retarded people is evil and Nazi like.
I do not believe in the tenants of NAMBLA, but sadly its existence squashes any discussion of what the real age of consent should be. Fear of PC backlash requires that I say I don't know what the age of consent should be, that I am not for lower it, just that it should be possible to discuss the issue. Ideally it would be based on some testable mental maturity of a minor wishing to enter adulthood. For the majority of Americans this might end up being 30, but for some percentage it would almost certainly be below 18.
I live in a college town. When The Bell Curve came out (dealing with race IQ differences), I found none of the college book stores actually carried this title.
There is a more open debate on drugs, but what about prostitution? Why are either illegal? They may have negative impacts on society, but this not how the debate is couched, it is always couched in moral terms. Why is paying people to have sex while you video tape them legal, but not for you to pay directly for sex?
Well that's enough anti-PC ideas for one post, hopefully someone will add a lot more to this thread.
Re:Um, no.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two good examples. First, casually mention anything that counters the current tenets of environmentalism. Dispute the data supported global warming. Or suggest that it isn't caused by human activity. Or that electric cars cause as much pollution as gasoline cars. But first make sure you're wearing asbestos underwear! The creed of environmentalism CANNOT be questioned. It's heretical to do so. It's not because anything else is a "poorly-supported fringe opinion", because there are plenty of scientists and climatologists that offer support to contrarian views. It's merely a difference in interpreting the data, or using different models. Much of environmentalism still rests on untested and inviolate premises. Question these and your career as a university researcher is finished.
Second example. Mention that you hold a conservative view on an issue. Any issue. It doesn't matter if you are liberal on every other issue. Just this one will get your branded as a racist or reactionary. I'm not talking about extremist conservatism. Mainstream conservatism is equally despised. Suggest that capital gains taxes should be lowered, as an example, and see how fast you're ostracized.Go to Berkeley and argue against rent control if you really want to see how intolerant the capital of tolerance really is. Sidenote: I'm not claiming that modern universities are "liberal" though. They're something else entirely.
Just voice any doubts about the holocaust (Score:1, Insightful)
And get yourself thrown into prison!
It is prety obvious that some powerful people are VERY afraid of what is hiding behind that curtain...
Not so?
Try looking up "revisionism" and "canadian".
Some truth is harmful; some taboos, useful. (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, take the statement, "All men are created equal." This creed underpins the foundations of American democracy. Is it true? Well, no, of course not. Some people are born smarter than others, with better athletic genes, or with other advantages or disadvantages too numerous to mention. But for our country to function as an egalitarian society, we must at least pretend to believe, and behave as if, the statement were true. Otherwise our society falls apart. That's why books like Charles Murray's The Bell Curve are so widely loathed. Even if the assertions in a such a book were scientifically accurate, to accept them as fact does more harm than good if it erodes the underpinnings of a society that tries to be fair and just.
In a sense, therefore, truth is not some unbiased, ideal thing that exists outside of our experience, but it is something that we define by our objectives and behavior. "Truth", in this sense, is a social construct. So can we truly be an egalitarian society? Well, we certainly can't if we don't accept that all persons are created equal. But we do believe steadfastly that equality is a worthwhile objective. And to achieve this objective, we have to brand as heresy any suggestion that some of us are born "more equal" than others.
What we need to take a hard look at from time to time is whether the objectives that such "truths" support continue to be worthwhile. And that takes courage.
Re:Things labelled heresy on slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
#2 wasn't true when Feminism meant "give us an equal chance, let's see what we can do." Now Feminism, after being hijacked several times by fringe groups, has more to do with lesbianism, anti-maleness, and moronic post-modern philosophies.
But they had power almost only when they had good ideas and lost power when they didn't.
And I'll second your #4.
Re:Yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it was obvious what kind of welfare was being referenced. Don't play dumb.
OK, I'll just tell you: it's the handouts-for-doing-precisely-nothing variety.
Heresy and the FSF "religion" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Two things you can't say (Score:2, Insightful)
When chosing your dancer for example, are you going to turn your brain off and choose the black participant, or are you actually going to evaluate all comers, black or white?
Will you automatically chose the male candidate to drive your truck, or will you take the time to figure out if the female candidate has better driving skills?
I've yet to hear of a dancing gene, and I've yet to see a study that indicates that the darker your skin the better the dancer you are.
Yes, people are different, and the sexes have (obvious) biological differences (though probably far less than you think). But that doesn't excuse you if you make the jump from sterotyping to prejudice, and finally to discrimination.
Re:Things like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah but that's only because the vast majority of all people are overseas.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm kinda torn on this one. I would get upset if someone called me "baldy" but amongst like kinds it effectively serves to mock others who use the term in a negative way. I don't think this is unique to black Americans. Women will often call each other "bitch" in a friendly way.
Even us "geeks" or "nerds" have embraced the term and nuetralized it. Though I think that the goal here is to make it widely acceptable. If someone called a Slashdotter a "geeky nerd" they would probably say "thank you". If black Americans wanted to kill off the use of "nigger", they would do the same.
What I DO find hypocritical is the whole "African American" line of thought. At some point Jesse Jackson determined that referring to someone by the color of their skin was a negative stereotype. So he wanted the previously acceptable term "black" changed to "African American". However, he still called white people
In other words, it's OK to negatively stereotype dark skinned people but FINE to stereotype white people.
I've recently started seeing "black" being used again in the media. Maybe it's Fox News, I dunno
Re:A quick list (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you've wasted away the statute of limitation on assult ("with a deadly weapon," perhaps?), at the very least you should get a lawyer to lobby your state's governor to get a pardon and clear your record.
Seriously, this sounds like the kind high-profile case ambulance chasers dream of. Think of all the headlines they could grab outspokenly defending you from a double standard.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:5, Insightful)
There are all kinds of things wrong with the way the modern feminist movement has approached the problem of gender inequality. But the notion that the feminist movement achieved its goals is, at best, fantasy.
Yes, women have the right to vote, and I don't know of any evidence that they are unable to use it, though the still terribly few number of women in the political arena suggests we still have a long way to go there. Yes, women are no longer barred from most educational institutions, but in spite of massive evidence showing that test like the SAT and ACT are biased against women (as well as minorities and the poor), they are still used by most colleges to determine admittance. Years ago, when I was an undergrad, a not-too-suprising article in the Daily Bruin noted that GRE scores were a lousy predictor of performance in grad school, especially for women vs. men. Women with the same GRE scores could be expected to get significantly higher grades.
Furthermore, all that education (which is really only beginning to actually balance out, and is doing so fastest among minorities), isn't really repairing the disparities in employment and pay. When you control for experience and education, women still only earn 81% [cnn.com] of what men earn.
There are a lot of explanations for this. Most common is that women are more likely to take lower-paying jobs that offer more flexibility, so that they can be available for child-care duties. However, men with children don't seem to experience a similar pay disparity, so this indicates a disparity in how child-care duties are distributed in households. It's still the case in most US states that, if a couple divorces, the mother generally gets the lion's share of custody of the kids. (My cousin in Arkansas raised his three kids singlehandedly *and* paid court-mandated child support to his ex-wife, because a mother who was a prescription drug addict wasn't, in the court's opinion, less fit to care for the kids than their father.)
But the fact that, as a society, we assume that women take care of the children affects women who aren't in this situation. My husband and I are having our first child in July. Since I'll (theoretically) be getting a master's degree in June, I can probably make more than he currently makes. So, after a few months to recover, I'll start looking for a job and, assuming I find one, he will quit his job to be a full-time dad. However, I'm already carefully considering how I'm going to handle my job-seeking, because if an employer knows that I just had a baby it will probably hurt my chances of getting hired, no matter how illegal that is. It's also very difficult to prove.
Then there are just general societal notions about what women can and can't do, as well as what they do and don't want to do. Women who are into computers and technology find this all the time. I had a classmate in my graduate program start "testing" me when I said that I was a computer geek. (He starts off with "Well, then, if I want to get a new Pentium 4 computer..." to which I responded "Why a Pentium? Why not AMD instead?" I tried to engage him in a conversation on what uses might indicate one over the other, and the issue of motherboard chipsets to support each processor, but he quickly changed the subject.)
Frankly, I'm angry with the feminist movement for getting rid of the compensations that we had without *first* fixing the problems we have. Why did men always pay for dates? Because they generally make more money. (It was always my policy to pay if I made more, and let him pay if he made more, and alternate if it was about the same.) Why did men open doors for women? Well, that's harder to answer, but maybe because women are more likely to be loaded down with kids and their accoutrements.
Re:Alcohol (Score:5, Insightful)
A little drink for a young teen at a family meal == teaching good drinking habits.
Keeping all alchahol away until 21 == making it more desireable than it should be, with habits formed at underage unsupervised parties.
No matter how obvious this is, it still gets people upset.
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's not forget that charitable shelters, giving poor people food, etc... are all done by private individuals and groups as well.
Those of us who oppose the "government" kind of welfare (AKA, forced redistribution of wealth) are generally very much in favor of the free (as in freedom) alternative of private welfare. It's not only a better system (as in more effective in helping people), but it has other moral benefits to the participants as well.
Re:Two things you can't say (Score:3, Insightful)
You can segregate based on male and female, because it's generally pretty easy to check for a penis or lack thereof. Not everybody fits, but most do. One of the side effects of removing sexual discrimination is that those that don't fit into one category or the other will certianly fit better into a single category labeled 'person'.
It wouldn't be practical to segregate based on race, because there are no convenient tests for it, and there's a lot more mixing. You could assign people based on their country, but then what's the point of having an international competition?
Things you can't do (Score:3, Insightful)
Examples of heresies about America (Score:3, Insightful)
it sponsors terrorism in the rest of the world to support its corporates objectives. Guerilla opponents of American policy are terrorists. Guerilla supporters of American policy are freedom fighters.
2) America loves freedom & democracy.
Only in America and only to the extent required by the shackles of it's constitution. elsewhere its OK so long as it doesnt get in the way of American policy. Which means its sort of OK in the rest of the West and a bad idea in the 3rd World since people have shown themselves to be more concerned with themselves and their own rights and wealth rather than the needs of America. Dictators can be bought cheaply to hold the peasants in line.
3) America loves free speeach
Yea as long as you dont try and distribute code that threatens profits or question corporate motives (unbrand america [unbrandamerica.org]). As long as you dont express support Al Queda. As long as you arent a black fighting slavery, or of Japanese descent in WW2 or an arab post 9/11. As long as you dont criticise America. Did you ever read the Phillip K. Dicks novel "what if America was really the Bad Guy?" ?
------------
Fuck you American mods - mark me as a troll: a large proportion of the World believes this. But I'm a troll because these views are heresy. Mark me '-1' so noone else sees my heretical thoughts.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:4, Insightful)
"Blacks are more racist than whites." I'd say they're about equal. As often as I hear an African-American complain about racism and discrimination I hear complaints from white people about "those damn n-(you fill in the rest)" and "reverse racism" and "favoritism."
"Homosexuality is not normal." I may personally agree that it's a sin, etc., but that's neither here nor there. If you don't want to be a homosexual, don't screw other men. If you do, go do so.
"Kids are best parented by a mom and a dad" (spelling corrected for your convenience)- I've known plenty of people who have been raised by homosexual parents who have turned out just fine. I've known a buttload of kids raised by people with views similar to yours (and some similar to mine) who have grown up to be drug-abusers, malingerers, rapists, and now President of the United States. Quite honestly, as long as the parents love the child, I couldn't give a crap about what gender the parents have.
"Tolerance means tolerate." A good point. Just because I respect your right to be an asshole and would defend you vigorously against any attempt to jail you or ban you doesn't mean I have to think you're right.
"Prayer in schools is harmless." No, it isn't. I don't want to be told by "God-fearing Americans" how to worship, and I *don't* want my kids to have to violate one of the most central tenets of Jesus' teachings by praying in public. Being told to pray, or even blindly accepting it, is an insult to them and an insult to my right not to have government touch my religion. You want your kids to pray in school, send them to a private school and leave the rest of us be.
"The Democratic party hates blacks." Where you get off on this fantasy is completely lost on me. It would be equally stupid to say that the Republicans are also inherently racist. Insensitive, cold, anti-American and corruptors of Christianity, sure. But, except for a few bungholes, not racist.
"Black is not a racial slur." It can be, depending on the circumstances. Too bad you think African-American is offensive; I'm very sorry for you. As another poster has pointed out, African modifies American. Trying to enforce "African-American" is stupid, but so is suggesting that "African-American" is "anti-American" or whatever the heck you're trying to get at.
"Read 'The New Thought Police.'" Read it. Full of crap. Next?
Re:Oh boy, where to start (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't have a multiple-front war without multiple fronts. Last time I checked, the Russians weren't in Italy, France, or the Pacific, and the Americans/British/Canadians/ANZAC/Free French weren't in Poland or Siberia.
I'm American, so feel free to flame me on that basis (also, my pompous twat-hood).
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Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant (Score:5, Insightful)
You appear to be advocating not trusting moral beliefs that are effective in doing good.
What alternative do you propose, people not wanting to "save the world" as you put it? Ignoring helping or not helping others altogether? You aren't seriously suggesting that the British being the driving force in ending world-wide slavery is a bad thing, are you?
I prefer to think that if a group or individual does something good, like ending slavery world-wide, they should be complimented on that, not denigrated.
Since we're on the topic of unspeakable things, perhaps we're dealing now with the current U.S. school taboo of never praising anything done by white males?
Re:Um, no.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"We are not any safer since Sadam was arrested" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Two things you can't say (Score:2, Insightful)
You *might* (and I don't know if you could) be able to prove statistically that "Most black people are better dancers than most white people."
I don't have a problem with you expressing what you believe. The problem is that your words in the example sentence aren't actually an accurate depiction of what you seem to mean, based on the fact that you accept that yes, a given white person might be better than a given black person.
I'm also very much curious about the male/female segregation in sports, as it implies that society views sex as the most fundamental division among humans. It also fascinates me because, well, what about hermaphrodites, or other sex organ abnormalities? Where do they fit? (Maybe there's a document out there that tells me.)
There's a part of me that thinks it would be wonderful to see women competing against men, simply because I believe that it has a good chance of developing much more capable female athletes than if females only had to compete against females. On the other hand, there's another part that fears that women might never become strong enough as competitors to then get visibility as professional athletes. So which is better, to promote better female athletes or to promote the visibility of female athletes? I don't know
Sometimes I think that simple phrase, "I don't know," is the least accepted in our current society. You say that women are generally inherently physically weaker. I say that I just don't know, and can't know, because we don't have a culture that prizes strength in females as much as it does strength in males. In fact, generally speaking, women with visible muscle are viewed with distaste. So, given that we've received tons of gender acculturation before we ever get a chance to participate in a sport, how can we possibly know the answer to the question of inherent strength?
Oh, and "some genders can't reverse park" is a pretty pathetic addition to an otherwise fairly thoughtful post.
Re:A quick list (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, in Europe and the Americas (since the arrival of Europeans) there was this little 1500 period in the past 2 millenia where "Christian" was the correct answer when asked about anything religious. Maybe in intellectual circles agnostic is prefered (for decades at most), but I for one was ostracized as a child for not being Christian. Yes, I was born and raised in central Pennsylvania, but Christian was most definately the ONLY acceptable answer.
Likewise, there have been several happy periods refered to by the institution of various Inquisitions. These varied in "strictness" by time and location, however answering anything other than "Christian" to a Spanish Inquisitor was punishable by torture -- until you changed your mind or died. Many Muslems, Jews, and others perished in this way.
Yes, Christians had it hard for that first few hundred years, but after they got rolling it really wasn't an uphill battle.
Groupthink and Acceptance (Score:3, Insightful)
In American society, other than threats and slander, you can say anything you want. All of the trollish ideas posters before me have come up as examples of "heresy" are regularly expounded in at least some contexts -- the idea that feminism is runining America is a recurring theme on lots of right-wing talk radio shows, the idea that 9/11 was not caused by Al Quaeda is not uncommon among liberals, etc. You're not going to get thrown in jail or executed for being a vocal follower of Noam Chomsky, either. But expressing those ideas will get you thrown out of the Young Democrats or the Young Republicans respectively.
And that's the real "heresy" any more. People pick a group, or a label, to identify themselves with, and peer pressure makes them fearful enough of opposing ideas that they'll act to suppress them rather than entertain an opposing view and possibly give themselves another choice.
A pretty good illustration of this is available any time on the Internet, just by going to, for example, a site which identifies itself as a "geek news" site and looking at the posts that get moderated down. While some of the down-moderated posts are trolls or obviously inappropriate, a lot of them are simply dissenting opinions that the moderator in question doesn't agree with, but doesn't want to form an argument against for fear of entertaining the dissenting opinion.
We always hear how bad it is to "preach to the choir," but in fact most people are members of a choir and want nothing more than to be preached to.
Re:Nudity harms children (Score:4, Insightful)
In many countries you have to be 21 to drink, well above the age of consent. Why is this? I'm old enough to own a gun or decide who is president but not have a beer? Someone who can drink at age 16 in Germany visits the US and is arrested for doing the same thing.
What's my point? Consent often has little to do with issues of harm or law. It's probably true that there is a greater good served by shielding children from nudity and sex. But what if someone believed or tried to show otherwise? The point of the linked article and the point I was trying to illustrate is that nobody investigates the specifics of the greater good because challenging it is a modern heresy. If children were actually worse off, nobody would know because those making that thesis or investigating it would be labeled "pervert" or "deviant" instead of "mistaken" or "erroneous".
- JoeShmoe
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Re:Two things you can't say (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to pretend that men and women are equal...
Patently untrue. People love talking about the differences between genders. The best selling Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus series of books, published at the height of so-called political correctness (1993 [amazon.com], 1996 [amazon.com], 1997 [amazon.com] & 1999 [amazon.com]) are just one example. For more examples, visit cocktail parties, dinner tables, and talkshows around the nation: sexual difference is one of our culture's favorite topics for discussion. There is also a whole branch of feminism called "Difference feminism" precisely because it focuses on how men and women are different.
Perhaps a better question would be why attacks on sexism are so often labelled "feminist" or "political" (both modern synonyms for "heretical", in my book) or misrepresented as outrageous claims of absolute "equality" (which only serves to cloud the real issue of equal rights).
You have to avoid commenting on any difference between the races, even though it's obvious that some races tend to be better at some things than others (maybe it's ok to say that), and ergo unavoidably some races are worse at some things than others (and it's not okay to say that).
The 1992 flick titled White Men Can't Jump [amazon.com] would suggest racial difference isn't as off-limits as you suggest.
However, I would agree that talking about race is something of a tabboo, but only among white people. This tabboo, however, is clearly not because people of color somehow police white people (the white people I know, myself included, police themselves when in all-white company). More likely, it has to do with the discomfort many whites feel mentioning race at all. Perhaps this is because for centuries whites talked openly from a standpoint of racial supremacy, and now that we've (hopefully) realized that this history is shameful, we're uncomfortable bringing up race at all.
Re:kiddy porn rambling blah (Score:3, Insightful)
Kiddy porn is one of those areas where the taboo is so strong that it turns into a witch hunt. Anything involving a person under 21 and a lack of clothes gets lumped in with kiddy porn.
It's to the point where some people worry about pictures of baby's bath and such as that. There have been a number of child welfare cases based solely on perfectly innocent pictures.
In the U.S. nudity in general is taboo. Pictures of it more so. Pictures of anyone under 21 nude far more so, without reguard to what they're doing (or NOT doing) while nude.
If you were 16 today and had nude pictures of 15-17 year old girls, you could have been jailed simply for having them.
That's why I WOULD call it taboo. Actual porn with children is just wrong, the 'leakage' to simple nudity of one's OWN children is the part that's taboo.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant (Score:2, Insightful)
Still a double-standard, but probably okay.
Re:Things like... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, well, um, this sort of reinforces my point. I voted for Gore (would've voted for McCain, but he didn't last long enough) and didn't think much of the 2000 election, but I don't think the election was "rigged" or that the Bush administration is a fascist clique. (Actually, most of the reports I've seen in mainstream publications have indicated that Bush probably would have won anyway - very narrowly, of course, and possibly still without a national majority - if a fair count was done.) Since I've lived here, I got to hear the same things about Clinton, coming from what Bob Dole called the "double-Y chromosome crowd." This ranting sounds just as dumb coming from Democrats or snotty Europeans.
Let's keep things in perspective; the USA has experienced many crises, but our system of government and our free and open society has proven resilient in the past, albeit with changes. There have been far worse threats to liberty and democracy in the past 225 years than Bush and Ashcroft, and scarred though we may be we've survived them all. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be constantly on the lookout for new threats like the Patriot Act or the illegal detentions, but I don't view these as heralding the end of American democracy. They're just another crisis we'll have to work out, without meddling from snotty EU bureaucrats.
We do NOT hate the people of the USA as a whole (but we do wish they'd learn a little logical and rhetorical skills so they can see through the lies and bluster of their glorious leaders)
This illustrates my point even better. You assume that the majority (okay, 49% or so, but even more voted for Republicans in 2002) voted for Bush because they're ignorant dolts easily wowed by a cowboy act. Most Democrats appear to believe this as well, hence the NASCAR/Wal-Mart allusion. In fact, a great deal of the people here really do support Bush's policies, and, more importantly, don't like snobby outsiders telling them what to think. I'm very sympathetic towars the latter view, especially after reading too much Chomsky and having too many run-ins with snobby Europeans and lefty Democrats, both of which tend to be just as insular and ignorant as the rubes they mock.
Frankly, we don't need advice from the Europeans on running a stable, pluralistic democracy.
Re:Two things you can't say (Score:4, Insightful)
So here's a question you can't ask: why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"?
You're mixing up four different things. First you talk about "races". But "black" isn't a race. Black is a skin colour. If you look at black people they come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I'm not just talking about individual differences. I'm talking about genetic group differences that differentiate pygmies from bushmen of the kalahari. Africans are people who come from the continent of African (including white ones). Chinese people come from the country of China (including the 55 "minority ethnic people" like the Mongols and Tibetans).
Four different things.
Saying that "black people" dance well would indicate some correspondance between melanin and rhythm. That doesn't make much sense. It seems more likely that the black people you know of come from a small set of cultures where they are trained to dance well. I wonder if blacks living in strict Muslim cultures are similarly skilled.
Talking about race is okay but first you have to define it. The problem is that people tend to use definitions that have no basis in science or history, only in their anecdotal experience.
Re:Oh boy, where to start (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps a different perspective would help:
I grew up in Russia, and went through school at the peak of the "stagnation" period. In high school, we had a history teacher who was a kid during the war. Now, history in Russia was one of the most politicised and heavilly guarded for ideological purify subjects, high school and college history even more so. So this teacher did not get to be where he was by being a dissident.
When we came to covering the War (in Russia, there is only one "the War"), he went over the events, as he should, then glossed over the chapters describing US non-role and non-contribution. Naturally, we noticed, and asked (and not all of the student believed what the textbook said). The teacher said that he will tell us a story. He told us about starving children living in dread and fear, whose brightest days were when a truck delivered food shipment from the US. In the shipment were huge chunks of chocolate, shaped like canon shells. Was it not for that, and more food from US, some of those children would not live to grow up. He then said, "I know that I'm supposed to tell you that US did not matter at all in the War. But I can't bring myself to say this. I remember that chocolate."
Re:Nudity harms children (Score:5, Insightful)
If sexuality in front of children (as opposed to "with" or "to" children) were as harmful as you suggest, none of us would be here today to debate it. Humans were having sex millenia before it was considered unacceptable to do it in front of children, much like other mammals.
Besides, there are other, potentially more deadly things that we do in front of children that we don't want them to imitate too closely, like cooking. We survive as a species not by making sure there are no children around to see us cooking, but by making sure that the children learn things like "don't touch a hot stove."
"Practically, they are unable to handle the consequences of being pregnant by twelve."
Only after the Industrial Revolution. Or we would be the only species emotionally incapable of handling parenthood despite being capable biologically. Most psychologists seem to believe that the current gap we see between biological and emotional maturity is because survival now requires at least a high school education in order to hold down a job and such.
Besides, this is the Twenty-First Century; you can have sex without getting pregnant and vice versa (unless you pay too much attention to John Paul II). If three-year-olds are capable of understanding "don't touch a hot stove," a child old enough to have reached sexual maturity should be capable of understanding "use a condom."
In my personal (anecdotal) experience, it seems that the children from whom sexuality is hidden from the longest are the ones most likely to be a parent at an early age. I'm sure everybody here has heard stories of children growing up in strictly asexual households only to get (somebody) pregnant in their freshman year at an out-of-state college.
Is it harmful to children, or is it simply embarassing to the adults?
Re:Those Shelters (Score:2, Insightful)
Nigger (Score:1, Insightful)
What you do is you start saying the word "nigger" really low during lunch, then each person progresses louder and louder. The winner is the one daring to say it the loudest (i.e. screaming it).
To show the effect of the "unsayable", I wasn't able to sit at the table because a table full of nig--black kids was sitting pretty close to us. What was odd was that they just continued their usual hooting and jumping and didn't really pay us any mind. I thought we were gonners for sure.
True story.
Re:My peers... (Score:2, Insightful)
-----
French literature and physics (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think this is true. Most physicists would have to spend five to ten years attaining fluency in French, not to mention acquiring the background in literary theory, before tackling a PhD in French literature. For most of them, that would would be just as big an ask as it would be for a professor of French to do the high school foundations and the undergraduate degree in physics that would be a necessary prerequisite for a PhD. After that, I think actually completing either program would be largely a matter of determination.
(My sister has a PhD in French literature; I have a BSc with a physics major.)
Danny.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually I don't think it does, nor do I think the rarity of women as Fortune 500 CEOs is necessarily a result of discrimination. Billions of years of evolution have resulted in men tending to have more desire and skill for leadership roles, on average. And when you look at the very highest positions, you have to go several standard deviations past the mean; very few men are able to reach these positions, but even fewer women are.
There are a lot of explanations for this. Most common is that women are more likely to take lower-paying jobs that offer more flexibility, so that they can be available for child-care duties.
Yes; according to your linked article when this is taken into account, the ratio rises to 88% or higher. And I recall recently reading a article claiming that women weren't as good at negotiating prices and salaries as men, which could account for the rest.
However, men with children don't seem to experience a similar pay disparity, so this indicates a disparity in how child-care duties are distributed in households.
Which again is not a surprise. Evolution and statistics dictate that *on average*, women will have a greater desire to care for children.
However, I'm already carefully considering how I'm going to handle my job-seeking, because if an employer knows that I just had a baby it will probably hurt my chances of getting hired, no matter how illegal that is.
Yeah, that's a problem. The thing is, it may be "rational" for the employer to discriminate in that manner. From his (yeah, I know) perspective, there *is* a danger that your child will interfere with your job duties, or that you may decide to quit altogether to stay at home. This is also a problem for women who haven't had kids; from the employer's perspective she could get pregnant at any time, which is a risk that doesn't exist for a male applicant. Sadly I don't see a good solution.
Re:Why a warning ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever I hear "Liberals are against free speech," I'm reminded of the fact that the ACLU often (much to its distaste) collaborates with the ACLJ to defend churches against encroachment by the government, or that it was the ACLU that defended the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie despite the public relations disaster. And really... is there a greater liberal icon than the ACLU?
Re:WAS JESUS A GAY NIGGER? YES HE WAS! (Score:1, Insightful)
Adult movie actors were routinely arrested for prostitution/escorted out of town in the 70s.
Popular speech needs no protection! (Score:3, Insightful)
Galileo was "fringe" and the church believed his opinions were "poorly-supported" compared to their hundreds of years of theology.
What people fail to realize is that popular speech needs no protection! Everyone is happy to protect those whom they agree with. The tough part is protecting those you disagree with--especially those whom you vehemently disagree with and consider a danger.
So, racist speech is not acceptable (and shouldn't be), and there's nothing wrong with that.Racist speech is the exact speech that *SHOULD* be protected and needs protected! Why? First of all, true racist speech can (and should) be rebutted instead of left festering hidden away somewhere. Second, all too often certain groups play the "race card" and claim racism to squash legitimate argument. Who is to judge whether speech is racist or not, especially when it involves a sensitive area such as affirmative action? You? The University? The Government?
for it, but please make a distinction between a vocal minority of shit-disturbers (who can be of any background/race/religion), the sensible majority (also diverse), and the administration (weasels).Galileo, Martin Luther, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Jesus Christ are all examples of vocal minorities of disturbers fighting against the majority. Minority speech is *precisely* what needs protected! Who else is going to benefit from free speech protections? The "sensible majority"? The administration?
Brian EllenbergerRe:Things like... (Score:3, Insightful)
I almost don't care that I disagree with you on points of substance now that you've shown yourself to be reasonable. You have no idea how refreshing that is.
Re:Things like... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not? a little advice can't hurt.
More seriously: Bush is hated because his influence goes largely beyond America. That is all. However hard you wish it has not much to do with 'snobby europeans'. We have our own nuts to deal with here (Berlusconi for one)
the gnat also said: "a great deal of the people here really do support Bush's policies, and, more importantly, don't like snobby outsiders telling them what to think."
As I said previously: that would be great if the Bush administration wasn't deciding things for the rest of the world. I know it has at least impacted my country economically and forced us to do things that are contrary to our values (such as giving the TIA complete information on every passenger travelling to the US - Big brother).
No such thing as international law. (Score:2, Insightful)
The status of treaties also varies from coutry to country. In the UK, treaties mean nothing until a bill is passed in Parliament. I presume the something similar is the case in the US as I remember that the SALT treaties had to be ratified.
There are various organisation that exercise what might be called international law functions (E.g. WTO), but no overall framework.
The US recently declined to support an international criminal court - possibly with good reason. It is much easier to take legal action against a country such as the US rather than North Korea, and yet millions face potential starvation in North Korea. Would an invasion or regime change in North Korea be "war crime" because it was "unprovoked", and the US could not come up with some legal pretext? That's not justice.
Re:Things like... (Score:2, Insightful)
A Londoner.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:3, Insightful)
Children are also something that shows our reactive nature fail us.
Drug treatment on children to the levels we experience is scary. What are the long term effects of these things? Are the effects really positive? Who are they positive to?
I have seen that integration of all kids (not racially, just academically) removes oppertunities for the children that can take advantage of them. Who wins when we teach to the lowest common denominator? What advantages are there? Do they out weigh the disadvantages? If not, isn't that bad for children and society?
Re:Things like... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Frankly, we don't need advice from the Europeans on running a stable, pluralistic democracy."
Actually since europe has been dealing with a large amount of the same issues as us for a much longer time it might be wise to shut the fuck up and listen. Most of europe has been plagued by terrorism for years, and one attack doesnt make the US or its gov't the authority on dealing with such things. this is proved by the sad fact that they passed laws to protect the people rather than taking action.
The rest of your post refers to euro's as snobby/snotty and lefties as dolts. Yet you seem to think that the average american has some sense of what bush has done in the past three years. (other than arrest Saddam bin-laden
We are moving our jobs and economy to a "Globilized" state, relying more on other countries to produce goods and provide services. This makes the Rich Richer and as such feeds the ultra-capitalist republican machine. Yet Bush ignores what the world wants has a whole and refuses to respect the authority of worldwide governing bodies. At the rate we are going how long will it be until foriegn countries and citizens refuse to work for american companies ? or buy american products ? what effect will that have on this country ?
Oh and i might also point out that never in the modern history of this country have we faced so much internal corruption and greed. Never has the gov't been forced to approve laws that help ailing industries, and stood idly by and watched hundreds of thousands of jobs sent overseas in the up coming industries, all while restricting the freedomds of the american people, going against the very nature of this country and its founding princaples.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:2, Insightful)
Investigation is a curious thing. If a group of people have a particular notion in their head, they will most likely find enough evidence to justify any outcome (flight being impossible to disease being the work of the devil). Opposing arguments will be accounted for, and the glass bubble is maintained.
Not necessarily heinous in its' intent: it just saves a bunch of legwork to find a working theory that fits your frame of reference. Rarely, if ever, does any evidence set the course for an investigation. Most investigations are merely filling in the holes of what is most probable (but not necessarily true).
Call it prejudice, wisdom, pattern recognition, or science; it's expedient and the way most things are done.
So when Sagan states "extraordinary proof", well, why? What extraordinary proof was needed to set the current framework of reality (other than being first)? Why does the inertia of one idea have to be overcome in order to consider another? Is it possible to examine other evidence based upon its' own merits without initially disqualifying any outcome?
That being said, how is it that your particular position is accepted as truth? What proof do _you_ have? And could it bear the same scrutiny that you are now applying to this new idea?
The point is not so much that I would be so bold as to (for example) say that Newton's theories were a crock, but their is a growing body of evidence that states he wasn't exactly right either (tongue-in-cheek).
I don't necessarily need to put forth a competing theory in order to point out all the holes in an existing one.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:2, Insightful)
but in spite of massive evidence showing that test like the SAT and ACT are biased against women (as well as minorities and the poor)
Speaking of heresy...
Why is that whenever any group does poorly at something compared to the majority, it is assumed that the activity in question is biased against that group? Perphaps women and some minorities simply aren't as smart as everyone else? But it would be heresy to say that, so we have to pretend that it's because of discrimination and bias in the tests.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:1, Insightful)
Your point is true, but not necessarily in this case. If there is truly "massive evidence", then something must be up, huh? I haven't read it myself, since (being a middle-class white male) I do pretty well on standardized tests.
There also might just be a lot more going on. (society tells females that they are bad at math, and doesn't encourage them, and then when they score poorly on a math test later in life it is held as evidence that they "aren't as smart as everyone else")
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think this is necessarily borne out by the fossil record. Early humanoids were not pack animals.
If men have more desire for leadership roles (and this is debatable), that could just as easily be explained by social conditioning as evolution. If they have more skill for them (and this is VERY debatable), this too is just as easily explained by socialization.
Yes; according to your linked article when this is taken into account, the ratio rises to 88% or higher.
So women without children to care for gain 8% better salaries, on average? That says to me that direct child-care responsibilities are a relatively small part of the explanation.
And I recall recently reading a article claiming that women weren't as good at negotiating prices and salaries as men, which could account for the rest.
It could account for it, but it's not an explanation. *Why* are women not as good at negotiation? Is it because they are somehow innately, due to that extra leg on the 43rd chromosome, missing some vital genetic code required for salary negotiation? Or maybe it's because women are consistently socialized to believe they're worth less than men? (I recall a fascinating exercise in one of my sociology classes... "Japanese Community and Family," oddly enough... where everyone wrote out on a 5-point scale how satisfied they were with seven aspects of themselves, including things like their body, their face, their national origin, their school affiliation [obviously this was the same for everyone], etc. When split by gender, the women's averages were consistently 1-2 points lower than the men's.... *even for school affiliation*, which was, as I said, the same for everyone. The professor had done this experiment on larger scale, and assured us that our results were quite typical.) Perhaps women learn different negotiating and bargaining skills than men do as they grow up. We don't know, but simply saying that their skills at this aren't as good doesn't explain away the discrepancy.
Evolution and statistics dictate that *on average*, women will have a greater desire to care for children.
But our current societal structure dictates that this is no longer useful, except for very young children. Yet we have to make *laws* to try to keep employers from discriminating based on this, and they routinely violate them anyway. Usually without malice or intent, they just don't realize (maybe because management is still a male-dominated area in most businesses?)
Yeah, that's a problem. The thing is, it may be "rational" for the employer to discriminate in that manner. From his (yeah, I know) perspective, there *is* a danger that your child will interfere with your job duties, or that you may decide to quit altogether to stay at home. This is also a problem for women who haven't had kids; from the employer's perspective she could get pregnant at any time, which is a risk that doesn't exist for a male applicant. Sadly I don't see a good solution.
How about this one: Cut it out. Just stop. Employers need a little old-fashioned consciousness-raising in this regard, so that they can notice and counteract when they're engaging in this behavior. We no longer have the infant mortality rates of a century ago, which dicated that women should keep having kids as much as they can so that the family legacy can live on. We're in no danger of dying out as a species. So it's ridiculous to keep punishing women for being female and being capable of pregnancy, especially in professional positions where employees are more educated and, presumably, have the resources to decide whether or not to get pregnant.
Either that, or we need to start treating men the same way. I don
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but computer geeks of college age generally tend to do this to each other, irrespective of sex. The constant attempts by geeks to start pissing contests is probably the most annoying thing about being a computer science major, in my experience. I'm a guy. (While we're on the subject, the attempts so many geeks make to define every social interaction in terms of computer dorkdom is a very close second.) Fortunately, people seem to either grow out of that behavior or get relegated to some dank cubicle where nobody has to deal with them, so it all works out for the rest of us shortly after they leave college.
Why did men always pay for dates? Because they generally make more money
Are you sure? I always assumed it was because men typically invited women on dates. If you offer an invitation, you don't place the burden of fulfilling it on the invitee-- this is true of all invitations, as far as I know. As for why men typically invited women on dates, I suspect it has something fundamentally to do with the respective roles of the sexes in procreation, same as it does for most animals. I'm glad we're getting past that, though.
Why did men open doors for women?
Gave 'em a chance to check out the women's asses.
Seriously, though, idunno. I hold doors open for anyone following me closely, and whether I go through the door before or after them depends generally on the logistics of the thing. It has nothing to do with vestiges of chivalry, or adapting sex-biased behavior to a more general politeness-- I've just always thought it rude to pretend someone isn't there, and holding a door open is just one of those small gestures that acknowledges that those around you are as good as you are.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the fact that you consider that test as odd tells me you have no idea how geeks behave, at least male geeks. It is common for male geeks to challenge, other geeks. No, not to become the Alpha Geek, but to have an opportunity to show someone something new, and cool.
That said, it also seems you won the challenge, and I doubt his geekness.
I have done software development for a long time, and I find it interesting that every female programmer I have had the pleasure to meet, not ONE was interested at all on any hardware sublects, and most had never taken the lid off their computers.
"But it's not illegal for a guy to pull up next to me as I'm walking home and describe what filthy things he wants to do to me... that's protected under the First Amendment. "
I suggest you look into the second amendment.
If you shot that guy and said you had been threatened, you would not spend a day in court.
If the genders were reversed, the man would spend forever in Jail, so sexism goes both ways.
I find it odd that my company went through a rounf od layoffs, and only laid off white males, even though some of the women employees, were less qualified, and more money.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Um, no.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You talk about "asbestos underwear". But people flaming you because they disapprove of what you say are exercising their free speech rights!
Also, labeling you as a racist or a reactionary is free speech as well. Your problem is you can't stand being disapproved of. You have no First Amendment right to be liked, and you have no right to demand that people associate with you.
People like you typically moved from a more conservative location (in high school) to a less conservative location (in college) and are shocked that your new neighbors don't think your jokes are funny.
As for your second to last sentence: dude, I went to Berkeley. Rent control in the city of Berkeley has always been a hotly debated topic with plenty of people vigorously arguing both sides. If you oppose rent control you'll find that about 40% of town strongly agrees with you and another 40% hates your guts (the rest is the swing vote). On campus, the pro-rent-control faction is larger because there are far more renters. Both sides use very strong language against each other. But that's what free speech is all about!
You can express conservative opinions all you want, and people can flame you for it all they want. You are not a delicate flower; you can take it.
Re:Things like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Christianity isn't based on fact (other than the fact that the bible was written down). It's based on faith. Faith is the belief in something absent proof. If you think that fact is the basis of Christianity, then I think you misunderstand the teachings of Christ.
There's nothing wrong with faith, but presuming/demanding that someone with a different background than you accept your articles of faith is no less unreasonable than expecting you to accept theirs. This is part of the reason for the constitutional separation of church and state... too many of the founding fathers' forbears had been persecuted, prosecuted, exiled and even murdered because they had dared to disagree with the religious views of the then-current government leadership.
It's not that they hated religion -- quite to the contrary -- They just hated the idea of being forced to accept someone else's religion. They also hated the corruption that power-politics could inject into religious issues if the two were too closely bound.
Emotive Language (Score:3, Insightful)
To define these terms: Emotive language is the choice of words that conjure up the desired emotions in the listener, whereas neutral language is devoid of such emotional associations.
Many of these terms are spread by people in positions of power, such as government leaders, major corporations and powerful lobby groups.
Let's examine two examples.
The DMCA was enacted to combat "piracy". The word "piracy" and its various derivatives are commonly used by MPAA and RIAA executives. However, the strict definition of piracy in the sense of copyright infringement is to copy someone else's work and sell it for your own personal profit. This isn't as widespread as the copyright holders like to have us believe. For example, someone copying a CD so they can have a copy in their car as well as in their home isn't strictly piracy because they are not selling the copy. Yet the RIAA would use "piracy" to describe this activity. The term "copyright infringement" is available for their use, but they often eschew this term for the less accurate but more emotive term "piracy". Why? To engender the emotional response they want in their listeners.
"Downsizing" was a corporate buzzword in the recession era of the early 1990's. What it means, however, is to make many staff redundant at once. This made many people unhappy because they were now out of work. The proponents of this corporate philosophy introduced the term "downsizing" because it was a term with no emotive associations. To get people to swallow nasty medicine, you have to make it taste bland. In the same way, to get the masses to accept something bad, you have to cloak the concept with a neutral name that is often derived from corporate doublespeak.
If you want to look for nasty ideas someone is going to foist on you, look for bland-sounding terms. On the other hand, if you want to "look under the rocks" as Paul Graham said in his article, look for emotive terminology and question the concepts behind the emotive terms.
Re:A quick list (Score:3, Insightful)
That bring up one of my favorite ways to resolve an apparent paradox, which also happens to shock the hell out of people (placing it firmly into the category of "Things You Can't Say"), namely:
"Never praising anything done by white males" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a white male. It rocks to be a white, straight, native-English-speaking male in America. I can wake up in the morning, just pull on whichever pant/shirt combination is handy in the closet, and go to work where no one ever talks trash about me having worn the same color for three days in a row, no one ever gets nervous around me for fear of saying some offensive remark about "my people", and no one ever is worried that I'm secretly stealing office supplies. I can walk around my neighborhood with minimal fear of personal violence, and if, God forbid, something did happen I can have complete confidence in rapid and reasonable response from our local police force. I never have to take a personal day for my religion's holidays; when my religion has a high feast or fast day, the markets close.
If my contribution is ever overlooked on something, I know it's because I didn't speak up loudly enough, or early enough. I know it's never my race. I can walk into any store I want to, look at items, handle those that are out, and security doesn't automatically start tailing me. When I walk into Philadelphia's diamond district, the assumption is that I'm looking for a anniversary present, not that I'm casing the joint.
When I look at the people in power - pretty much anywhere - I see, by and large, men who look like me, albeit usually older. When I pick up any high school or elementary school textbook, and look to see what historical figures they're studying, I see other white males. Sure, I may also see people who weren't white males, but let's face it - George Washington isn't getting written out of American history classrooms any time soon. I know that the child of Mung immigrants going to a public school half-way across the country is going to learn about a winter in 1777 in Valley Forge where some distant ancestor of mine died. My daughter, were she to attend a public school here, would be far from certain of learning of the great service that child's grandparents gave to this country.
White males have it good. Our position is not in any danger. We can stop shouting "help, help, I'm being oppressed" at every imagined slight. (remember when the standard joke was that radical feminists were thin-skinned?)
Political correctness is either dead or, as the trolls say, dying.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nudity harms children (Score:1, Insightful)
And if this is true then your point is basically moot. What difference does it make that people were emotionally prepared to have children at a younger age in the past if that's no longer the case?
We have children later in life because that leads to a higher standard of living. Taking examples from the past doesn't make a very convincing argument.
If three-year-olds are capable of understanding "don't touch a hot stove," a child old enough to have reached sexual maturity should be capable of understanding "use a condom."
Don't be so sure. Volating the "don't touch a hot stove" rule has immediately painful consequence, which makes it extremely easy to learn. "Use a condom"... well, look at how many adults have yet to learn it.
What You Can't Say Reviewed (Score:3, Insightful)
Graham writes about heresy - moral heresy. Saying the things that would be considered distasteful or would get you in to trouble. He brilliantly notes moralities similarity to fashion; "invisible to most people... Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good."
This is the test that I regularly apply to my own beliefs and which regularly causes my friends to sigh in frustration. There he goes... again. It's great having friends that still love you after you challenge every belief that you share with them. Sometimes I find out that our shared belief rested on a strong foundation of experience and/or tradition, but usually I find out that we've just been thinking what we've been told to think.
If you don't have friends like I do, Graham mentions other ways to seek out heresy besides "The Conformist Test":
Trouble: look for things people say and get in trouble for.
Heresy: look for the label 'heresy' in any one of it's forms ("indecent", "unamerican", "defeatist"). New ones are created to silence current heresy.
Time and Space: compare heresies between cultures separated by time or space. If one culture has a heresy another doesn't than it is likely the heresy is mistaken. For example, taboos against murder are nearly universal.
Prigs: find prigs, subtract lived experiences and examine their thoughts. Kids and teenagers are the best repositories for complete mint collections of taboos.
Mechanism: examine how taboos are created. "To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it... And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo" The taboo breakers on the otherhand "will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd."
Another rather heretic point Graham makes is that, "Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think."
I would however questions Graham's belief that, "there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress." This seems like an assumption that needs to be broken heretically. There are many smart people that use their intelligence to reinforce convention or shape convention to suit their needs. I do think that some people are more 'disruptively intelligent" than others. They have an easier time than others ignoring or challenging convention. For example, people that are classically 'mentally challenged' generally challenge convention more than average. I would argue that their intelligence is just different from the average - they are more intelligent in certain
Re:Things like... (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest social fallouts of this era aren't going to be the direct result of the actions of suicide bombers and 'terrorists'. They're going to be the resul of the actions of those who are using the (relatively minor but spectacular) attacks as an excuse to squash civil and human rights in currently 'democratic' societies.
Technically: Terrorism is the use of terror to achieve ones's ends. In that context, the legislators who used the Sept. 11 bombings as an excuse to pass legislation what would have otherwise beeen tossed out as unconstitutional and un-democratic are as much terrorists as Bin Laden and friends.
Re:My favorite heresy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Those "scientists" are ignored because they discredited themselves. Yes, AIDS is nothing more than a collection of symptoms. That's why the 'S' is there. It's a syndrome. HIV destroys the immune system, which inturn allows the things that actually kill you (i.e. Kaposi's Sarcoma) to do so.
Blaming chemotherapy (which causes all sorts of problems) for AIDS simply isn't supported by the data. Same as saying taking AZT causes AIDS. The AZT "link" sounds like someone needs to brush up on the difference between correlation and causality.
Complaining that these scientists aren't listened to, is the same as complaining that Flat Earther papers aren't accepted into geography journals, or that Creation "Scientists" theories that the Earth was created in 6 days 8000 years ago aren't taught in school. There's a reason for that. Those theories aren't supported by the data.
And here I thought that maybe, just maybe,
Re:Um, no.... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a reason why certain ideas are called "unsupported". That's because the data simply doesn't back them up. As someone with a techincal background I thought you'd understand that.
[C]asually mention anything that counters the current tenets of environmentalism. Dispute the data supported global warming. Or suggest that it isn't caused by human activity.
There's been 30+ years of data regarding global warming. CO2 levels have risen dramatically since the industrial revolution. Way more than can be accounted for by volcanic processes, or , the "conservatives'" favorite, cow farts. This increase correlates with the increase of the average global temperature of 1 degree centigrade. (This increase also outpases any fluctuations prior to the CO2 increase.) Couple this with rapid deforestation, you create a situation where the heater is on, and the air conditioner is off.
CFCs do destroy the Ozone Layer. That's been proven experimentally. Since CFCs were banned, the Ozone hole has begun to shrink. Yes, it fluctuates year to year, but the overall trend is clear.
Or that electric cars cause as much pollution as gasoline cars.
Depending on how the electricity is generated, then perhaps yes. The polution produced from the production of electric cars may be in fact very different. For example it's well known that while solar cells do not create greenhouse gasses, solar cell production and decommissioning creates numerous pollutants. The question is: Do the costs outweigh the benefits?
But first make sure you're wearing asbestos underwear! The creed of environmentalism CANNOT be questioned.
The reason is you're shouted down, is simple. The data isn't there. Sure you can find some guy to say that all the data is bogus, but that doesn't mean it is. I can find a flat earther today. I can find several people claiming that they have data proving that man and dinosaur walked hand in claw 6000 years ago. Anyone can make a theory, but if the data doesn't support it, it's bunk.
Voting doesn't matter, nor do presidents. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmph. I voted Libertarian, but had someone put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one of the majors I would have voted for Bush in that election. Why? (1) Reading _Earth In The Balance_ had long ago convinced me Al Gore was a pompous nitwit. (2) Bush claimed to be a fiscal conservative, (3) Bush claimed to be noninterventionist, whereas Gore was big on "nation-building". Subsequent events have pretty much demolished points (2) and (3), but that's only obvious in hindsight.
But getting back to the main topic under discussion, here's something you can't say in America:
It doesn't really matter who wins the presidential election.
Seriously. There's no way to know in advance which candidate will make a good president. They both lie about who they are and what they believe and what they intend to do, and they both will get diverted and distracted by the bureaucracy and the opposing party and world events to such a degree that basically all bets are off. (The weirdest thing about the last election was that Bush pretended to be strongly pro-life and Gore pretended to be strongly pro-choice to fit the expectations of their respective parties, and voters bought it and thought that it mattered.)
Even if you could know what the presidential candidate intends to do, the chances are pretty large that he won't be able to do it, and the chances are even larger that nothing the president does will directly affect your life or that of anybody you know.
National politics is basically an expensive form of entertainment, not a way of getting much useful done in the world. And your vote doesn't matter. Even if it mattered statistically - which it doesn't - even it determined the outcome between the top two candidates - which it doesn't - it still wouldn't make much difference, because those two candidates have been chosen to look and sound pretty much the same and have no preformed opinions of their own that they wouldn't sell in a heartbeat.
Incidentally, that's why the last election was so close. Because there was really nothing to recommend either candidate over the other, it was basically a coin flip. It's silly to call the people whose flips came up Heads "flaming idiots" just because yours came up Tails.
Re:On children and swearing (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Average life expectancy was low in the past primarily due to deaths during infancy and childhood. The life expectancy of a male who reached 15 hasn't changed all that much over the years. Some, but not much.
My guess is that extended childhood, like extended retirement, is a luxury good that we are now able to afford. Kids kill time getting random degrees they don't need and will never use, socializing, and basically goofing off for years and years because parents can afford to support them doing that and want to allow it. Every parent dreams of offering his kids "a better life than I had" and each generation is on average a lot richer than the previous one, so each generation gives their kids a little larger gift of time.
Re:Why a warning ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Part of the problem is that many of the most radical so-called liberals are fanatically wedded to an ideology... and any fact or event they encounter is twisted through the filter of this ideology to fit, or ignored, or worse, agressively attacked as 'wrong' or 'improper'. In certain environments this will lead to people purging out or even killing those with differing views, or whom they hate.
This is NOT a problem limited to so-called 'liberals'... some conservative groups and fanatical religious followers have these traits as well.
As you implied, a 'real' liberal would be for free speech, and more importantly, would be willing to adjust his worldview when new facts came along. A real liberal would look at the world through an open, though critical ("is what I think consistent with what I "know"?) mind.
Discrimination is discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as we have a topic dedicated to ranting, I'd like to say that if I could remove one phrase from the English language, it would be "reverse discrimination." Descrimination is discrimination. If you are a Japanese store owner who charges me more because I'm Korean, that's discrimination. If I am an African-American employer who won't hire you because you are white, that's discrimination.
"Reverse" discrimination would be not discriminating against someone.
Your examples aren't real (Score:4, Insightful)
The truth is, of course, much more complicated, but I think it must fit nicely with their opinion of Americans in general.
I have a friend traveling in Indonesia right now. When she got off the plane with her husband and child, a neighbor of her relations there was nice enough to give them a ride to the home they're staying in. Guy had an Osama Bin Laden sticker in the window of his car.
My point being: things are a lot more complicated, you bet. For example, a quite moderate, friendly, helpful Muslim from a pretty typical rural area has this sticker in his car. He told her he put it up there after Bush's "Crusade" comment early on after 9/11, speaking of W.'s gift for finessing international relations. Her impression was that he regarded it about on the level of the "Support OUR Troops" stickers you see in the US. And this person is quite capable of seeing the difference between "Americans in general" and the policies of a particular administration, and remembers, in excruiciating detail, the claims made about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. More than I can say for my Southern Baptist relations, who've sort of let those details slip if they ever followed them at all.
It ain't just a stereotype on that end. Nor is it in Europe. Like you say: more complicated. If anything Americans have much more stereotypical ideas about French people 'in general' than the other way around, from my experience.
This sort of falls into the same category as effete upper-middle-class liberals sneering at NASCAR fans and Wal-Mart shoppers; apparently arrogant elitism is no longer considered rude.
You maybe haven't yet learned that that entire chapter of Ann Coulter's book was based on a lie? The New York times did run a story the day after Earnhardt's death, you can look. The Walmart reference came from another story a few days later, written by an "effete," Southern, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist. (Is it rude, or just unscrupulous, to make stuff up like that? You'd have to ask Ann.)
Political spectrum creep..... (Score:1, Insightful)
He isn't left of center; he is merely claiming to be less conservative than he really is. And that is why you can respect his viewpoints.
How Race Plays Out In Court (Score:3, Insightful)
Now this may simply be a matter of circumstance (black defendants had multiple charges, prior convictions, etc.), but to see it turn out similiarly on two separate occasions really made me realize how our racist and classist justice system operates. The black defedants cannot make bail, get worthless public defenders to represent them, and stand before a judge who would prefer it if they did not exist. Isn't justice supposed to at least pretend to be fair?
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Re:Things like... (Score:2, Insightful)
> Those people were (for the great majority of them)
> captured while bearing arms against American servicemen.
Is that supposed to be a crime?
The hostages at Guantanamo were members of a standing army of the Taliban, which at that time claimed to be the official government and army of Afghanistan. Some countries recognised that claim, most didn't - but the fact is that on the ground, the Taliban *were* the ruling authority of most of Afghanistan.
That ruling authority was invaded by the US (I am not trying to pass moral judgement on the invasion itself, or 9/11 - simply recounting *facts*). These people were captured while fighting against that invasion.
Again, I ask - how is that a *crime*? They were on the other side, and they lost. That does not make them criminals (or heroes). Bearing arms against the US army is not a crime, in itself (particularly when you are being invaded).
Ask yourself this - would Vietnam be justified in indefinately holding American soldiers, as prisoners without any hope of a trial, after the conclusion of their war with the US, simply because 'they were captured while bearing arms against Vietnamese servicemen' ?
All too often, I think most (thankfully, not all) Americans have such a blinkered view of morality and logic, that I shudder.