Posts by Shakje

Chris W

Thanks for this, I'm enjoying it.

>I didn't find it offensive nor can I see why it could be construed as offensive nor can I see how it is poking fun at Christianity.

You specifically said that it was "ok to poke fun at Christians". Since we don't have an equal example of them removing something that seems inoffensive, then it's pure conjecture that they would or wouldn't ignore it. Since they've already, very recently, removed adverts deemed insulting to Christians (that I found confusing as well), I don't think it's a fair assessment.

>Discrimination cannot be compared with corporal punishment for what is a non-elected lifestyle. A dent in ones feelings is not the same as a dent in ones skull.

I never mentioned stoning, that was you. The point I was making was that religions get away with all sorts of offensive behaviour, but if something that is even remotely related to their religion is used humorously (even if it's not the target) they are up in arms.

>There's the rub, there are so many to choose from

Indeed.

My real point was that the following:

>Exactly, but by finding the advert acceptable they are effectively saying it's OK to make fun of one group while others are off limits.

Has absolutely no basis in fact, and just doesn't follow from what's actually happened. You admit yourself that you can't see how it could be offensive, so that's all that can be gained from this whole mess. It's not offensive, so there's no reason to remove it. I'm not sure what part of what I said you really disagree with :)

I bought an iPhone

because Nokia pissed me off, WM7 looked limited and clunky, and Android didn't support NTLM auth at the time. And I liked the phone after playing with a colleague's for half an hour. Each to their own I guess.

I think you're lost

Daily Mail is that way -------------->

Yup, see the pit? Just keep walking, there's a magical hot air bridge sponsored by Jan Moir and Richard Littlejohn.

Read. Think. Reply. Not that difficult is it? Maybe comprehension isn't your strong suit, but I'll answer your irrelevant reply anyway - maybe this time you can actually respond to what I post.

What you don't seem to get is that evidence which falsifies models is a *good* thing. It's a very good thing. It means that those models can be restructured to take into account the new data as well as the old data and see how well the model predicts the future climate. Do you think any biologist actually assumes that evolution works in exactly the way that Darwin thought it did? What do you think happens when something goes wrong with it? Was it just chucked out or was it refined to actually match the data? What about General Relativity in light of the expanding universe, was it just thrown out immediately? Granted, the constant was already in there, but you get my point.

Look, if I give you a graph that shows the vertical speed of a thrown ball as it decelerates to the tipping point, and I use a bit of easy maths to predict when it will reach that tipping point, and then you look at all the data and my answer matches it, is that not evidence that the prediction I made was correct and the maths that I used was accurate?

Now let's say it's a planet, and we take data from a hundred years ago about its position, apply gravitation to it and work out where it will be tomorrow, would that be a valid piece of evidence for the success of gravitation?

Now let's say we have 50 years of climate data and we build a model using the first thirty years, if the model then correctly predicts the next twenty years within an acceptable error margin, does that not lend credence to the model? Seriously, do you actually think that scientists just sit around all day working out new ways to trick the news and betting on how easy it will be to blame something on climate change? I await your provision of a model that fits the current data without factoring in the increase in CO2, and the published paper that will destroy climate change for good.

It annoys me no end (actually I'd say makes me angry)

when people compare their country (UK, US, etc.) to the USSR or the DDR. If you think that things are anywhere near as bad then you're insulting the people who gave up their lives in those states because they believed in an ideal, or because they had misgivings, or because they were the wrong type of person, or just because their neighbours didn't like them. The actions of our governments are indeed worrying, but there's really no comparison to Soviet states, and if you don't believe me, go talk to people who lived through those times and were affected by them, or go to the Stasi museum in Berlin, or just read a bloody book.

Say that every time I hear a knock on the door and open it that there's someone there. I conclude that there is a person outside knocking on my door, and if I question that person then they confirm it. One day I hear my door knocking, and I open it to find no-one there. I don't suddenly throw out the concept of someone knocking on the door or treat it as something that will rock my world-view, I look for reasons as to how it might fit into my evidence-based knowledge. Being sceptical doesn't mean that every time your world-view is challenged you assume that it must be wrong and that you have to discard everything previously immediately, it just means that you're willing to consider all possibilities. The correct explanation is not the one which fits the most recent problem, but the one which fits *all* the preceding evidence as well. I've compared creationism and climate change denial before, so I won't do that here, but if you take the view that you should discount just how well something is established by evidence when looking at new results you fall into the same trap that creationists do when they claim that radiometric dating is flawed because such-and-such was dated incorrectly.

I think you'll be waiting a very long time to see man descended from monkeys...

Shockingly

it's from building up a resistance via second-hand smoke. I fear for the next generation.

Only if you're a failure.

@Denarius

It depends on how you view free will, and I think that the way that religious people attack the idea that free will is an abstraction use mixed meanings to do so. By this I mean that on the one hand you treat free will as a veneer over thought processes in order to single out people who suggest we don't really have free will, but then you compare it in your head to automatons simply carrying out tasks, all the same. Personally, my own view of free will would be something along the lines of:

Our brains are wonderfully complex organs. They take in information from a huge variety of inputs (memories, real world data), process it in the blink of an eye (based on brain structure from lifestyle, genetics, etc.), and then send off instructions wherever they need to go. If you have a panel with one button on it, and you press the button and a light comes on in a predictable manner, it's pretty easy to work out how it works behind the scenes. Now scale it up a bit, say you've got 100 switches that have to be pressed in order to turn the light on, can you work it out easily? Or how about 10,000? Or 1,000,000? There is so much that affects the processing of the brain that abstractions are built up around it. How would you *expect* to perceive the brain making decisions without free will? Abstract logic and "free will" (by this I mean the perception of making choices) is an artifact of brain activity, and this seems utterly clear.

This leads onto the next point that you make about moral responsibility. There's two things that need to be said here:

1) If that's the way it is, it doesn't matter if it raises difficult questions about society and morality, we have to work through them. It would be like choosing to believe that earthquakes don't happen because you don't want to think of the people who die in them.

2) I've spent a long time wondering about this myself, because it seems clear to me that free will *is* a veneer, therefore I cannot ignore the question because it could affect my whole moral framework. Well the way that I resolve it is that, like quantum mechanics, while it may seem like a completely different world on the micro level that seems to invalidate everything that we know in the classical world, if you scale it up, you need another level of abstraction to cope with the complexity that *necessarily* must exist. Society and law appears to fulfill this role quite neatly. If anything, it's like a huge scaled up version of a brain, with parts of it being governed by remembered morality, parts of it governed by more primal urges, and parts of it governed by the need for communication, which all leads to societies which have worked out ways to function coherently, and as a result have survived. There's a big leap between the action of one neuron firing and a society meting out justice. In fact, my views on determinism are the main reason that I find capital punishment evil.

The idea of being morally responsible before your deity is nicely sidestepped in the Catholic religion (as long as you avoid the mortal sins), and whenever something evil can be justified in terms of religion (when it is quite possibly against other views of morality), such as the killing of kuffirs, or the killing of babies in the Old Testament. When "absolute morality" can be changed so easily if it appears to be the will of your deity, or when it changes halfway through the book (i.e. treating the Bible as one book) and appears to align with iron age morality and discard anything from the last 2000 years of social thinking, I don't hold out much hope of it being a good guiding light.

I don't think that's a fair comment as it has happened in exactly the same manner in religion. Catholicism's support of Hitler, monetary, and in mobilization of German Catholics, because, quite probably primarily, of anti-Semitism springs to mind. Or the support of Israel, sometimes unquestioningly in the US. People will justify the stupidest things in the name of clinging to their beliefs, whether those are stupid religionists or stupid atheists, and that says absolutely nothing about the truth or untruth of the beliefs, it's just a sad reflection on humanity.

I haven't read it, but I automatically get my back up when people compare something relatively mild in a democratic setting with the USSR or DDR. Having visited the Stasi museums in Germany, and having a wife who is very knowledgeable in that research area, it's insulting to the people who have had their lives destroyed or seen their parents killed, or lived in a prison all day to compare it to something as petty and trivial. It's like saying that having your desk separators removed at work is like being in a concentration camp. You're an idiot if you really think there's a comparison, and if you'd heard the stories of some of these people, and heard them breaking down and crying, maybe you'd be a bit more reticent about making such comparisons.

ElReg needs an icon for People Who Don't Actually Know What They're Talking About But Think They Know All The Arguments.