Let's please distinguish between "terrorists" and terrorist suspects. Don't run right over the complex political structure and non-structure of our conflicts in the Middle East and pre-qualify these prisoners as absolute terrorists.
Most of the information we needed was obtained by verbal communication, so you should understand that I'm troubled over a suspect being waterboarded afterward 50+ times in a month, for what?!
It's a game of numbers. A handful of suspects in a prison means nothing on a news ticker, it's a rather elusive way that we treat death when the passing of a local girl sprang public outrage over the girl's parenting and supervision, whereas we're completely passive toward the 1,000's of soldiers who died in Iraq. It really depends on how absorbed you are into the situation, and when the whole world is watching you backstep on your own practice of due process and a fair trial, it becomes a little more than a symbolic issue.
Terrorist SUSPECTS, Pyg.
If you're truly interested in disclosing the argument about Obama and change, then by all means challenge me in a debate, however I'll have to reject this argument due to topical relevance for the current moment.
That's sort of a presumptuous statement, don't you think?
And Middle America can be swung one way or another given the fitting propaganda, Bush's exaggerated (in retrospect) records and reports in making the case for Iraq pulled America almost unanimously into war.
So please establish whether Middle America really wants to be tough on crime and terrorism (especially given the controversy over Guantanamo), or is just currently scared or ignorant of the situation at hand.
As for this change you expect, it's been a few months, time will tell.
No, babies don't bomb people, they are the same people as YOU AND I from birth. Not homogenous throughout their lifespan.
I believe the manipulability of people by their environment combined with dangerous teachings will make a dangerous person, and because of this, terrorists aren't intrinsically different people who should be treated as such by killing them instead of long-term negotiations and reasoning.
I'll take an observational approach for each aspect of either philosophy.
Economically speaking, capitalism has enabled us to generate mass amounts of wealth by allowing the basic human element of personal gain/greed to empower society through investment and mass production. Usually we work upon an exploitable resource until new market trends point the industry in another direction. So we get a steady rise of wealth over time and an occasional recession when resources run out and the market forces reset themselves to a new craze.
That would be ideal. However, in today's society this profit-based motivation has pushed jobs overseas in search of maximizing profit. It has caused overproduction in housing and crashed its value. It has spawned loan sharks and usury. It has allowed the oil enterprise to dominate our energy industry and suffocated any attempts at pushing for efficient, American-made, renewable, non-pollutant energy like solar, wind, hydrogen, etc.
Today's society is too structurally complex for blind market forces to repair themselves into working order. We can't expect our energy producers to group together and re-organize countless gas stations, power plants, and energy production facilities to accommodate this.
We need a group of experts to oversee and intervene on behalf of the greater good. Folks, I'm sorry, we need government oversight.
What we don't need oversight on is our lifestyles. I think we can agree that morals will change from person to person, it isn't fair to force one's views upon another especially when morals are an extension of preference and are therefore subjective.
Unless you're religious, in which case is unacceptable in the realm of a free democracy, especially when it makes people fervently adopt fallacy for fact like:
1. A group of cells equates to a living, conscious human, such that when this group of cells is disrupted, it equates to murdering a person.
2. Homosexuality is harmful in some way to other people and changing the legality of same-sex marriage will change the sexual ratio of the population which has remained relatively constant for millenia regardless.
What group would encompass people who infringe on personal matters that have nothing to do with them? What group would encompass those who discredit science (the most reliable source of all) and credit people they like dressed in suits, or credit an ancient religion? What group stubbornly insists on rigidity in the face of emergent and duly needed change?
The Republican Party. I will take no part in that.
(about 1.) This alone has caused centuries of social and emotional damage, has destroyed women's lives, and stunted the most promising branch of medical research in all history.
Are terrorists not the same people from birth?
People aren't born evil. I could take two identical twins, raise one in Texas, the other in Iraq and the two will be blood enemies.
Think about it. This experiment showed that under the unprovoked influence of a mere idea, 75% of the population could be brought to kill somebody.
Now imagine you've been taught Islam from birth with the added provisions that America is a tyrant devil and that Christians and Jews pose a threat to eternal salvation. Then the tyrant devil blows the shit out of your village and your family and the rest of your fellow villagers find out about it. It's no wonder they shout "DEATH TO AMERICA". They're as pissed and charged as our own 9/11 victims.
People can be easily inflamed to murder. And when they're misinformed, they become nazis, terrorists, martyrs, jihadists, hezbollah, north korean militants, bolsheviks, kamikazes, etc.
Let's take a second to examine logic.
It's our mammalian way of understanding or mimicking the known order of the universe. 1 + 1 = 2, red pigment mixed with yellow pigment will yield orange pigment, objects of mass will gravitate towards each other.
If we algebraically and logically move among our observations and theories we will eventually find that living, breeding, then eventually dieing is a very bleak existence and has no logical "purpose" to it. Life, reduced to pure logic, has no meaning.
Picture a species that doesn't like other like creatures. It would die off in civil war. A species that doesn't mind dieing wouldn't fight for survival. A species that doesn't have a hunger would starve. A species that doesn't feel pleasure would feel meaningless.
Makes perfect natural, evolutionary sense.
It's this funny thing we have called an emotional consciousness. We have IRRATIONAL factors that provide a motivation for us: fear of death, seeking reward and self-sustenance, and an intuitive bond towards others. If you think about it, everything we do in life is designed to satisfy these emotions, because they are, in fact, our ultimate motive. To satisfy our emotions.
JakeJ, you're an idiot. The color of someone's skin doesn't tell them to abide by religious doctrine. There's a difference between an active moral authority and the arbitrary shade of your physical appearance.
We know religion is responsible for jihadist martyrs, on the other hand black people definitely aren't solely responsible for rape.
What a terribly weak argument.
People don't need religion to know right from wrong. You said it yourself. Drugs can hurt people. So we should probably do something about it. This is called judgment.
Don't surmise that someone who can't make logical decisions without threat of being eternally reprimanded or has to be rewarded with eternal glory has MORE morality than someone who can decide the above situation on their own.
Obviously life can't be explained in a few experiments. There are several of them. These 2 new developments in tandem with experiments in the past should collectively prove life's formation.
We have:
1. Replicated, mapped, created (in various parts with relatively simple methods to that of most technology today), anything-else-ed life in various forms.
2. There is an extensive fossil record with plenty of transitional fossils.
3. We've documented all of the necessary processes of evolution in action and seen natural selection take its course countless times.
You all forget, experiments like this take place in what represents a puddle or so in a few days of testing, imagine the probabilities involved with the surface area of the ENTIRE GLOBE over EONS.
Seriously. Guys. It's like Wheel of Fortune where there's one letter left, just solve the damn puzzle.
This is the newer, badass version Miller-Urey experiment. Cheers to science.
As for the question: if science "can't explain life", then why is it that so many organized religions already claim to know the answer?
Let's take a second to define science. Your career is based on reliable performance and credibility. You can only submit a query based from previous knowledge in the form of a testable hypothesis. Then, you will test this theory with the utmost precision, several times. Then after you publish your findings, then science will test and scrutinize the hell out of it several times in THEIR laboratories. And only THEN is your statement or conclusion a valid explanation or theory.
I hope we can understand that science is the most reliable source we have.
Where are the headlines? Announcements? Shouldn't we be "fair and balanced"? .....america?......guys?
I can't fathom how many newer, more obvious implications will arise from observational science before people here in America stop looking to backless religions.
Don't you find it ironic that McCain ran a series of smear campaigns and brought Palin onboard?
That doesn't smell like hype to you? Ruthless negative campaigning and no plans or specific solutions except for vague 10 second taglines? A regular old woodswomen from Alaska gaining peoples support just for her evangelical philosophies?
And yet Obama sits down and states what he intended to do in the style of FDR's fireside chats. Now THAT'S baseless hype.
Unless you're basing from some naive perspective that presidents aren't HEAVILY advertised in the first place.
So, what, every airborne commercial photo-op has to go directly to the president? Get real, Jake. He has delegates to handle these responsibilities, an administration, he's human, he can't know everything at once. There have been millions of photo ops in the past.
Not only that, but this is the jurisdiction of New York, not the federal level and the only reason it is now being reprimanded at this level is because of extensive media coverage.
And hype over Barack Obama has nothing to do with this issue. That's a charged statement and you know it. Way to be unbiased.
It employs people. But it also takes countless other people sitting at a desk, an incarceration system, a trial, and payment for all of the law enforcements equipment. The flagrant waste of tax dollars outweighs a handful of jobs. A handful of jobs paid for by YOU so you can be slammed against the hood of a car for a victimless crime.
And legalizing may spring the use forward a bit, however during the Prohibition era of America, the restriction of alcohol brought innumerable amounts of new people to drink regardless, and its inevitable sale was instead left to booming gangs. Don't tell me restriction is an effective/ethical practice
1.He rippled the hearts of several countries in Europe, Slash, they weren't "a bunch of dumbasses" they were multiple and varied populations united by militant hatred and demagoguery.
2. You just skimmed over that part didn't you? I said conservatives here in America like war, in other countries people with differing viewpoints can be war-oriented. Liberal and conservative aren't general philosophies they are defined by the political region. This just means that if you like war, you're not necessarily conservative anyway.
The main argument is that:
A. War and militancy killed 1,000,000's of Jews before saving them.
B. The outcome of the holocaust doesn't bind them to be eternally grateful to war-mongering.
C. Jews may be war-heads anyway, Isreal has been a place of war for millenia. Supporting alternative energy, socialistic governing, and liberal social agendas doesn't make them "hypocrites".
Simple, we've documented evolution in current years. We've seen it happen. Yes, the chances are very small that something will successfully evolve which is why it takes millions of years for new species to arise.
For example, the monkey family has an extra set of chromosomes. WELL GOD MUSTA DID IT! No, occasionally in evolution, a set of chromosomes will become fused. Chromosomes have end caps on them to tell RNA where to stop coding. Chromosome 3 in our genome is actually a smashed together 15 and 16 from the monkey family, proven by the matching DNA and the site on the chromosomes where there are two end caps are illogically joined. Then there's fossils and anthropological remains to show the progression. That's how. Do your research.
In the car analogy, "crashing" together is instantaneous.
It took literally trillions of years for our universe to become the way it is and throughout that time things have gradually developed. Human life didn't spawn out of nowhere, that's what YOU believe, that man was crushed from dirt, if you actually believe Genesis. What science actually supposes is that multiple forms of life exist down to the simplest level, we've recorded and documented the process of evolution in current years, there are fossils that point exhaustively at a common ancestor, and that life gradually developed up to our level, each predecessor and prototype sustaining itself.
Once again. In response to the video, which stated that there are two ultimatums, 1. Either everything came from nothing, or 2. Something always existed. All you did was assume everything came from somewhere, placed God before all of this, and closed off the causality chain with the exact opposite argument.
Once again, in response to the video. If there are two ultimatums, that Everything came from nothing, or that it always existed, then why does the universe have to have a beginning? You've just assumed this and then closed off the causality cycle with the opposite argument.
1. Wasn't it militancy that spawned the Nazi empire in the first place?
2. You're assuming within the argument that military action automatically means conservatism. It's simply a trait assigned to conservatives here in America because these ideals have always been around in our country. In some countries, war-hawks are actually liberals. Even so, being a proponent of military action is only one trait of political background.
Woodrow Wilson: progressive Democrat, brought us into WWI
FDR ("I... hate... WAR"): Democrat, brought us into WWII
Everyone agrees to war if it's necessary. Your argument is very weak.
It is to be expected of the older generation to criticize the new. Not simply out of tradition, but it's a recurring fact that has a method to it's madness.
Generally, a nation like America will progress forward in sense of technology, intelligence, social welfare, etc. and each generation stuck along this timeline will become rooted in their ways just out of personality and a natural inability to be psychologically adaptive, in the sense of "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". It's just a biological course trait affected by the environment, so of course there will be deviants, but this is the general behavior.
I'll use African-Americans as an example. 200 years ago, they weren't even considered to be human. That generation was convinced that they had a right to enslave these people, while lo and behold the next generation, the abolitionists who were considered radical at the time swept in and started arguing on their behalf, then while slaves were free later on through the 1900's they were still second-class citizens until the 50's and 60's where new radical desegregators and freedom riders and sit-in companions came in and started a movement for final equality and even they were brutally beaten for it. Each generation outgrows the last and is shouted after.
There are no definite lines, but generally these ideologies took hold largely in part to new, younger thinking. We listen to rap and metal, while mom and pop listen to Elvis, while grandpa thought Club Jazz was as unconventional as it gets. It's a continual cycle.
We are to some extent a spitting image of our parents, but we will generally improve upon older ways, "those who criticize this generation" of course, won't like it.
