Posts Tagged philosophy
The Human Condition
Posted by Jacob in Imported from LJ on October 23rd, 2007
It’s fascinating how we get so accustomed to our condition that we become blind to it. I was microwaving some water a few days ago and thought, “wow, I’m using an appliance that’s the result of years of research using concepts and discoveries which themselves took years to develop. The whole process has been slowly building on itself for hundreds of years (or longer, depending on how you look at it), and most of the time I just walk up to the thing, stick in my food, and _still_ wish it was faster.” Why don
Hello, would you support horrible things?
Posted by Jacob in Imported from LJ on October 3rd, 2007
How much better off would we be if newspapers printed stuff like this instead of the daily roster of human tragedy?
“She asks me what I think of a pending bill in Congress that would allow the “opening up of our borders” to allow the importation and marketing to seniors of “potentially contaminated” drugs from foreign countries like China and Mexico and if I would support such a policy? Talk about a loaded question.”
Read more about your friendly neighborhood drug company’s efforts to lie to congress through statistics at cranberry190’s blog.
It’s a crazy country we live in
Posted by Jacob in Imported from LJ on February 4th, 2007
Bomb or Aqua Teen hunger Force advertising device?
For anyone who hasn’t already heard, the residents and city officials of Boston have gone completely insane. It all started when two guys working with Interference, Inc., a marketing company hired by the Cartoon Network, installed the device pictured above and others at various locations in 10 US cities.
The devices had been in place for two to three weeks before a number of overly paranoid residents called police and reported the “suspicious devices”. What followed is absolute insanity. Police closed major thoroughfares and a subway line near where the devices had been installed, and after discovering that they were just battery-powered lights advertising a TV show, labeled them hoax devices. “Those conducting the campaign should have known the devices could cause panic because they were placed in sensitive areas.” “The individuals who placed these packages should be warned that there is a heavy penalty — two to five years imprisonment for each one of them. We are not playing around.” In addition, Time Warner is being fined half a million dollars.
Okay, so let me get it straight. It’s your fault if some idiot panics over your light-up cartoon character, and you deserve to be put in jail for 2-5 years for every one of them you put up? If that’s true, these guys are going to get life in jail! It just blows my mind that the general public has gotten so riled up about this supposed terrorist threat. Let’s see… 2,819 killed by terrorists in the last 5.5 years comes to 513 per year. Compare that some 16,000 murders that take place every year, and I think it’s obvious the terrorist threat isn’t really that big.
If this stuff isn’t thrown out of court, we all need to be afraid, very afraid. Successful totalitarian regimes don’t gain power by force; they convince the populace to hand it to them thankfully in exchange for perceived safety. The news of the day shouldn’t be that two guys freaked out an entire city with their lite-brites, it should be that they were arrested and prosecuted by an overzealous police force working for an over-paranoid populace.
Update: Turner Broadcasting, parent of Time Warner, has agreed to pay a $2,000,000 fine and has publicly apologized. “We understand now that in today’s post-Sept. 11 environment, it was reasonable and appropriate for citizens and law enforcement officials to take any perceived threat posed by our light boards very seriously and to respond as they did.” What, meaning that because the media and the government have gotten people all paranoid over a very small threat, it is reasonable and appropriate for people to be paranoid? I guess that makes sense in a sad sort of way. At least it’s a media company paying the fine.
The good news is that prosecutors are, “in discussions with the [guys who put up the signs] attorneys to resolve the charges before a trial.” So I guess we can hope the real victims of this won’t spend the rest of their lives in jail as officials had originally threatened.
Atheist walking
Posted by Jacob in Imported from LJ on October 16th, 2006
On the rare occasions that I get into an argument with a believer, I usually wish that I could come back with a sound, short, and convincing response to their (usually) ridiculous questions. The best I can typically do is to walk them through a rather academic and dry argument that goes something like this:
I think the only justification for believing something is seeing an indication that it is true. This totally rules out faith. I usually say “indication” here because some religious folks seem to confuse “evidence” with “proof”, and frankly there is very little proof of anything, but quite a bit of evidence of a lot of things. Basically I’m trying to jump the gun on their assumption that I’m just a close-minded atheist who would require irrefutable proof to believe, even though that’s probably the truth. I then say that I don’t really see any indication that the universe was created by or ruled by anything similar to their god, or that there is an afterlife, or anything supernatural. Therefore, I consider it irresponsible to go around believing in those things just because some ancient people wrote a book that says they are so. I do see a lot of unanswered questions, but there have always been unanswered questions, and historically people have very often answered those questions with “God made it so!” until someone smarter came along and said “no, fool, the world is not flat and it does not sit on the back of a giant turtle,” or, “no, fool, there are these things called “electrons”, and when they are disproportionately distributed between the clouds and the ground, sometimes they decide to rectify the situation.” Just because we don’t know the answer yet doesn’t mean that we are incapable of knowing it, or that for some strange and inexplicable reason a bunch of ancient sheep herders were better at figuring it out than we are. So, to sum up, my lack of need to have an answer to everything trumps your guesses.
Unfortunately the typical response is something like this, “I already believe these things that you do not see an indication of and therefore I am very uncomfortable with the idea that they could just be the fantasy of a bunch of crazy people that lived thousands of years ago.” Ok, so really that’s just what I think is going on in their subconscious. Usually it comes out as, “but there is lots of evidence. Just look at the bible. That is very well documented, and there are many different accounts that all say Jesus was a real person, etc. etc. etc.” Which is totally rediculous. There are plenty of other things written long ago that we know are myths. Just look at the Qur