I usually use jazz as background music for studying; it's generally complex enough to keep me awake, but not so complex as to distract me from my work, and there's plenty of instrumental jazz out there with no lyrics to distract you. I'd start with Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, but that's just my personal preference!
AE Repeatedly, publicly talking about "Axis Of Evil" countries. Also calling North Korea's leader a "pygmy", and various similar statements. Apparently with no thought to how any of this would be received abroad, or how it might impact attempted diplomatic relations with those countries.
He has produced a copy, you can see it right here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/
Personally I love last.fm, mainly because the artists and genres that I tend towards listening to are very well-represented in its streaming offerings.
This is from the article that I've linked below:
"According to CNN polls from this year [2007] and last, 80% of Americans support "allow[ing] illegal immigrants already living in the United States for a number of years to stay in this country and apply for U.S. citizenship if they had a job and paid back taxes ... And the CBS/NY Times polls, also from this year and last, find slightly more than 60% back "giv[ing illegal immigrants] a chance to keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status" over "deport[ing them] back to their native country." "
So just to make it clear, you are not speaking for the majority of the American people when you say that you "want the illegals OUT".
Google, for the reasons stated above. Also, the various other Google products (Notebook, Gmail, etc) tie in well with Google search, and Google makes it easy to implement their search in other websites.
I noted my SAT score only in relation to the comment you made as to my supposed "selective reading comprehension". Apparently we share that affliction. I would also note, in case it has escaped your attention, that you are the only one in this debate that has felt the need to depart from debating the subject at hand, in order to attempt to impugn specific peoples' mental abilities/grasp of logic. You have such a fantastic grasp of logic and reason, you shouldn't need to get into extended arguments with people as to their relative understanding of said concepts. Your arguments should speak for themselves.
Of course it's not my place to tell you how to behave, but being as you are involved in academia and an American citizen, it's my opinion that you have an obligation to keep an open mind and ear, and to be willing to learn from anyone, even those younger or in some way "below" you. To be make a habit of treating your students in a pretentious and condescending way would tend to shut you off from any possibility of some knowledge gain on your part. Also, some of my very close friends are a family that are very well educated (2 PhDs and 4 masters between the 4 of them), and which includes 2 current college professors. I have never seen any of them be the least bit condescending or pretentious—ever, to anyone. So you can't quite tell me that becoming a pretentious, condescending snob is an integral part of being well-educated.
You have not offended my "dainty sensibilities". But you have attempted to treat me as if you were my superior, without earning my respect.
I have a very firm grasp on what I would define as logic. I scored a perfect 800 on my SAT reading comprehension, and my habits are not your concern. And debating with you would be considerably more enjoyable if you were not so condescendingly pretentious.
No, it's still an entirely pointless example, because it was built on your mistaken idea that penguins didn't have feathers. You can't make a logical argument that penguins aren't birds based on the fact that they don't have feathers, because they do, thus invalidating your argument.
Firstly, penguins do have feathers, so that argument's not exactly the best example. Not to mention the fact that if there were birds without feathers, then saying that "all birds have feathers" would be a completely false argument. It would not be logical to state that all birds had feathers, if some birds did not. But thank you, because I'd never before gotten to post a link anywhere relating to penguin biology.
To me, you're essentially making the argument that any stance on a god or gods' existence cannot be built on solid logic, being as there is no solid evidence, which I agree with. But I tend to view "illogical" as meaning going against logic and/or reason, and being as there is no solid logic and/or reason on the side of believing in god/gods either, it doesn't seem to work.
I'll give you that. I still don't see how you're deciding that it is both illogical and rational, though. My dictionary lists "rational" as being "based on or in accordance with logic or reason". If we've already decided that atheism is not based on or in accordance with logic, that leaves reason. And my dictionary, again, lists "reason" as being "the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic". Also "what is right, practical, common sense". I'm still not seeing how you could manage to come to an illogical conclusion based on reason.
I agree that logic and reason are not the same thing, but for the sake of (this) argument, I would argue that they are synonymous enough that it does not make sense to deem something as being one, but not the other. Should've clarified that in the original post.
How does not believing in a god appeal to ignorance, any more then believing in a god appeals to ignorance? Also, logical and rational are synonyms.
If we're going to keep following the same strategies over there, then I would say yes. Without implementing some sort of radically different and vastly more effective strategy, I don't see us ever really stabilizing Iraq. So then it becomes, do we leave now and watch it descend into chaos, or do we wait another 10 or 20 years, lose more soldiers, spend way more money that we don't have, and then leave and watch it descend into chaos anyways. I understand how upsetting it is to go into a country, destabilize it, and then just leave and watch the bloodbath. But what we're currently doing over there, and what we've been doing for years now, doesn't seem, to me, to be leading to any kind of lasting stabilization.
For the United States, the richest, supposedly most advanced country in the world, to have mentally- and physically-disabled people ending up on the street is definitely a failure of society. I would also argue that to have people end up on the street because of not being able to afford medical care constitutes a societal failure. The degree to which healthy, non-disabled people can blame their homelessness on society is, I think, debatable, and would tend to depend upon their individual case. But the least we can do as a society is provide better safety nets for our sick and disabled.
Maybe I'm not reading that right, but in case you actually meant that there were no polar ice caps in the 1950s, you are absolutely incorrect. There were then, there are now, have been for thousands of years.
Right, except for there being hundreds of thousands of factory farms, and significant differences on a number of levels between supplying meat via factory farms, and supplying meat via hunting. I understand what you mean semantically, but since most people probably have a decent concept of what "factory farm" means, and since how the world is supplied with meat has and will have a large impact how many artificial hormones and antibiotics people ingest, the environment, and the economy, among other things, this debate is absolutely a valid one.
""The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.
The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
"Over eight out of ten American climate scientists believe that human activity contributes to global warming, according to a new survey released by the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University. The researchers also report that belief in human-induced warming has more than doubled since the last major survey of American climate scientists in 1991. However, the survey finds that scientists are still debating the dynamics and dangers of global warming, and only three percent trust newspaper or television coverage of climate change."
http://stats.org/stories/2008/
Global warming is real, we have almost certainly helped cause it, and I'm sorry, but the dangers are too great and most likely too near to sit around arguing down every last person that wishes to keep their head in the sand in order to continue living their absolutely unsustainable lifestyle. There really isn't time to wait around, while the icecaps melt, the Gulf Stream gets disrupted, and the fuel supply runs low, for every last person to get out of their Hummer and realize that if you want the world to be any kind of decent for human habitation, for your children and their's, your lifestyle needs to change.
I don't think that "taking the edge off the situation" is the right approach in the first place. Americans are still buying SUVs and cars with bad gas mileage, and they're still building houses that are several times the size they need to be, even in the face of $4 gas and the impending energy crisis. People are going to keep using up too much of our finite resources, and trying to ignore the fact that our oil usage is not sustainable, until the situation gets really bad. Taking the edge off of it by drilling in a few more places and staving off fuel scarcity for a few more years is only going to enable the continuation of those unsustainable habits for a little longer, when we could be actively trying to move everything over to more sustainable systems before it becomes a major crisis.
And my understanding is that there is no way to extract oil from the ground without causing some environmental damage (with the building and operating of the machinery, etc), and running the risk of oil spills. I was referring to that when I said environmental degradation, I didn't mean that it would utterly destroy everything in an x mile radius or something.
I don't feel that politicians who are religious should hide their faith, and if their faith is going to be influencing their decisions in a serious way, I want to know. However, I feel that being (or at least saying that you are) "strongly religious" and having your faith supposedly play a big part in your decision making process is some sort of requirement in this country to get elected, and to me, that's counterproductive. Going on and on about how Christian you are and how much you're essentially willing to ignore the separation of church and state does not make you a qualified leader. And basically running on a platform of your Christian-ness, taking advantage of peoples' devotion to their faith to get elected, is disingenuous. If you're religious, fine. But I don't think that that should constitute a legitimate campaign platform.
We need to be focusing our energies and resources on developing alternative fuel sources, and finding lower-energy-usage ways of doing things. Off-shore drilling would just slightly prolong the inevitable, that being that accessible oil is going to become much more scarce in the coming years. We can lift drilling restrictions, start wars, and generally do whatever it takes to not have to face the fact that our lifestyles will need to change. But all that will leave us with is a more degraded environment and a more violent and unsafe world, and we're still going to run out of oil regardless. I'd honestly rather oil went up to $5 a gallon sooner rather then later; I think that that will be better for the world in the long run then trashing our environment some more so people can afford to drive SUVs for a few extra years.
I definitely will be, I love FF. And the more attention it gets, the more converts it should get, which I'm all for—IE just sucks, plain and simple.
Because having to make student loan payments for the next 20 years will build character and responsibility!
Touché. It could be pointed out here, however, that the titles at the top have been changed, and both are now labeled as "This side". So a "that side" cannot actually win at this point, being as it has ceased to exist. Which has also rendered my original argument (and a lot of everybody else's) completely pointless, oh well.
