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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
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Arwon Bazu                 Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| There are good people who don't accept Jesus as their saviour and don't believe in God.
If you don't believe in these things, you go to hell. Therefore some good people go to hell. Why do so many christians seem to have such a hard time with the idea that some of their fundamentally decent family, friends and loved ones will be/are being tortured for all eternity? Isn't this a logical consequence of the belief system? Isn't it just intellectual cowardice to believe in magical death-bed conversions saving people, and in "purgatory" and so forth? |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Which of course begs the question of how people can sing praises to a deity they think would do that... it seems like a form of self abuse to, firstly, submit to these impossible standards of behaviour and these beliefs. Maybe it's why most christians I know seem pretty miserable.
When people die, especially those who were the most irreligious and stuff, the last place I could ever find solace is in the company of the pious. They DO. NOT. GET. IT. "He's gone to a better place" -- how do you know?? According to your rules, no, that's not the case, he hasn't. Don't be a wimp about these things. Originally posted by witeasprinwow Firstly, my understanding is that purgatory has no actual scriptural basis and is, more or less, made up for precisely the reasons outlined. A prime example of people not being able to deal with the repercussions of the things set down in their own faith. Wimpiness. Changing stuff willy-nilly to make the ideas seem less crazy. Now, I do know a little about the bible, and I know a lot about how fucked the world is, and it seems like given how the world operates if there is a God he's far more likely to be what the fundamentalists think--spiteful, capricious, pretty fundamentally unjust--not what the wishy-washy liberals think. Stuff like the the testing of Abraham with Isaac, for example, ot the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah... that stuff is BATSHIT CRAZY and people's only response to this observation is to suggest that this can't possibly be true and blah blah blah. The evidence indicates that our beliefs are misguided, so we must be making a mistake in our interpretations of the evidence. The entire first half of the Bible is basically God doing crazy shit, and the second half is about "the only way to God is through Jesus". Where's this forgiving, feel-good, all-loving God the more wishywashy christians keep talking about? Where's the evidence for it? I'm sorry, but I can't see how these ideas that, for example, people of other faiths or no faith go to heaven, are anything other than people trying to ameliorate the unpalatable, batshit elements of the faith they've got themselves into... it's all well and good to claim this stuff but it just sounds like desperate rationalisation to me. (edited by Arwon on 08-01-06 07:10 PM) (edited by Arwon on 08-01-06 07:18 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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O SHID I forgot Streetfighter II. Ah well, it's not in the list anyway.
Originally posted by witeasprinwow Isn't "it's really fun" kinda the exact criteria here? |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Everyone is trying to get to the bar.
The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven. The band in Heaven plays my favorite song. They play it once again, they play it all night long. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. There is a party, everyone is there. Everyone will leave at exactly the same time. Its hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, and so much fun. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. When this kiss is over it will start again. It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same. It's hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be so much fun. Heaven is a place where nothing every happens. Heaven is a place where nothing every happens. |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I think you mean a bloody means. | |||
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| You need to define "intellectual culture" as opposed to "pop culture" and "counter culture". Are you proposing an eternal standard-bearing high brow canon of intellectual works against which we measure current output? By intellectual culture do you mean academic culture?
For mine, I'd argue that pop culture is part of intellectual culture. I don't think you can draw a meaningful distinction between different cartegories. What's the Simpsons? What's Shakespeare? What about James Joyce's filthy, filthy love letters? I don't like the idea of culture as eternal and unchangable and in need of protection. Culture changes over time, it forms new theses and antitheses and synthesis and the result is change. This concept of "damage" is subjective and I for one would argue that, on average, pop culture has become more complicated and intellectual over the last, say, 50 years. -------- As for language. It seems like you're basically arguing a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language shapes and limits culture and exp For example: It has been said that Irish has no words for "yes" and "no". This is often claimed as some sort of pop-linguistics idea, implying that the Irish have some crazy perception of the world that doesn't deal in absolutes. Actually, it's just a quirk in the structure of the language, where you attach a negative or a positive modifier to the verb instead (I think that's how it works). Same deal with Innuit and its "40 words for snow". It's an polysynthetic language where, effectively, a "word" could be composed of enough components that it's a complete sentence in other languages. Politeness is especially subjective and you can't claim a particular language or culture is especially "polite". Every society on this planet has very different politeness behaviours and they don't translate. I imagine that a lot of Japanese behaviours seem quite rude to people of other cultures. Other examples: Belching is polite in Polynesian societies. In English we place great emphasis on polite words, whereas in Spanish there's less emphasis on this and more on polite tone to requests, and so forth. Stuff like personal space requirements are different everywhere. Japan isn't more polite, it just has different ideas of politeness. ------ Language changes over time, and languages are shaped by circumstances more than the converse. English started off as a peasant language, Spanish was shaped by a large degree of mixing between people from different regions, French by the imposition of a centralising and dominating nation state run with one specific dialect, and so forth. Japanese developed the way it did as a result of the circumstances it's in. If Japanese is a highly rigid, regimented language, then it's because Japanese society has been that way. There's been little mixing with other cultures, little immigration or population movements to cause elemtns of the language to have to interact with new situations, and the result has been that a lot of the complex rules and distinctions have been preserved for no real reason except that's how the language is spoke. By contrast, English speakers have undergone titanic changes over the last thousand years. We've lost things like noun case inflections and grammatical gender. We've simplified verb conjuugations dramatically and moved to a system where instead we rely unusually heavily on word-order and auxilary words. We've imported large chunks of French and Latin vocabulary, simply because the language developed that way fluidly and naturally as a result of the circumstances of the speakers. Is the language any poorer for this? Nah, it's just different. Standard language forms are false and temporary and inevitably eroded by organic change. (edited by Arwon on 08-03-06 01:48 AM) (edited by Arwon on 08-03-06 01:59 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Put up 3 or 4 in a run-off. | |||
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| The funny thing about the Klan is that they're scattered, fractuous, isolated and in terminal decline, there's only a few thousand of them left. The name and imagery is used by a number of groups, these days it seems like they're mostly a form of trolling when compared to more robust psycho-rightist groups.
Supporting them is just retarded. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| It was actually started to resist Reconstruction in all its forms, which certainly meant keeping blacks down, but it also meant targetting carpetbaggers. At least in its original incarnation. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Wikipedia's really good, it helps you piece together gaps... but of course you've gotta know a bit to begin with so you know you're not being bullshitted.
Plus I'm a history nerd so I knew they were a reaction to Reconstruction. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by emceeOriginally posted by Arwon Possibly true, but then, I don't study US history and never have. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by Lemurian Thanks for that. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I moved about 3 hours north, to Sydney, for university. I've lost track of most of my friends from high school except for 2 of them. I live with my best mate, and another good mate lives in another part of Sydney and I see him fairly regularly.
The end of high school ends a whole lot of relationships and friendships and that's pretty much just the way it works. People drift apart, and in cases where "going to school together" was the main point of commonality it is hard to maintain that connection. That said, it's not *that* hard to keep in contact if a real effort is made. We live in an age of intarwebs and mobile phones and telegraph wires, after all. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Bah. Most laws, certainly all the minor ones, are forceful suggestions, norms set for facilitating the smooth running of society. The law isn't a moral force in itself. (edited by Arwon on 08-12-06 11:58 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Yeah, instead you get the problem that anyone in the American government or Air Force gets arrested for crimes against humanity when they travel abroad...
OOPS! |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Yarrrr, that's awesome. Why the outrage. THEY'RE DIGGING FOR GOLD, PEOPLE. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Morally, it's abhorrent. It would be an entirely unwarranted undermining of the principles of equality and presumption of innocence and so forth, it would encourge abuse by overzealous security forces which would easily descend into racist harassment. It's a blank cheque to assume everyone who looks foreign is a terorrist, it's legal sanctioning for racist perceptions in the rest of the populace. It's a recipe for blowback and resentment among the target population. It's essentially a proposal to hassle a minority of millions of people for the actions of literally a few dozen.
The fact that this is even getting serious discussion demonstrates perfectly how bad people are at accurately concieving conception of statistical risk. 99.999% of Arabs are not risks. Out of the millions of Arabs in the west or elsewhere, (and other predominantly Islamic ethnic groups... the London bombings were performed by Pakistanis, not Arabs, for example, and the Bali bombings by Indonesians of some sort) virtually none have ever been terrorists, a few thousand at most. The % of Arabs who've ever been terrorists in the west versus the % of other ethnic groups, or the % of total population, is probably quite similar... about .001% or something, purely because even in the current climate of fear and paranoia there's just not that many terrorists, Arab or otherwise. It's simply unfair to institue a policy which paints all Arabs, or middle easterners, or people who might be muslim, as potential terrorists by default. Should we profile Basques or the Irish too? What about rednecks in the US given their propensity towards violent political exp On a practical level, Arabs are a caucasian people and it's difficult to differentiate clearly from others. And if you wanna go by religion, well, there's Muslims of every race on earth including Europeans. Focussing on certain characteristics can only let things slip through the net. Most terrorists are men... but focussing on that can let women through. At the moment... most terrorists are inspired by shitty readings of Islam, but does that mean it can be guaranteed all potential threats are? By focussing on that you can easily miss other threats, be it white supremicists, hardcore leftists, anti-government paranoids, random psychopaths, or whatever. Narrowing the focus makes it easier to get through. Sure, we've never had a little-old-lady terrorist but can anyone of you guarantee there never will be, to the extent of actually giving them a free pass through security? Given the numerous nasty implications and complete lack of practical basis as a policy... it's not an efficient or worthwhile policy to target a single ethnic group like that for the actions of a vanishingly small minority. It's not practically effective and even if it was, it's still morally wrong and sends us down a dangerous path of assuming certain groups are guilty automatically. (edited by Arwon on 08-17-06 10:37 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| So we should racially profile young men?
Anyways Bass, we're talking about profiling for fighting terorrism here, so those sorts of big proportions don't apply. Even in a case such as crime (and I'm gonna assume that despite the abstractions we're arguing in terms of black Americans here since they're the archetypical example), focussing on that 10% of that populace disproportionately, has a couple of ramifications which I think can undermine the effectiveness of policing completely. Policing, afterall, is not a military exercise of force against hostile threats, it's supposed to be a cooperative, consensusal exercise. Policing relies, at least partly, on the willingness of the community to be policed. And I think such things as racial profiling massively undermines that. Firstly, to use your hypotheticals, it takes the heat off the people committing the other 50% of the crime, which can only have a deleterious effect on law enforcement overall. A prime example would be in American drug laws where despite the fact that drug use is pretty even across all ethnic groups, the largest group of prisoners for drug offences are, by a wide margin, young blacks. Whites are far less likely to either get caught or jailed for drug use (now for me the solution is to STOP JAILING PEOPLE FOR DRUG USE but that's a whole other argument). Secondly it creates an over-policing bias, where because there's more cops on certain beats, a higher proportion of people get caught for, often, less severe things (the "Driving while black" phenomenon?). It must be noted that "amount of crime committed" is at least partly a function of how much gets prosecuted... in fact most crime statistics in most places are based on prosecution numbers (that's certainly how the ABS does it), so crime statistics and ethnic profiling can be a kind of a reinforcing cycle to some extent. One brilliant illustration of the way crime statistics are affected by reporting and prosecution levels is the fact that assault rates in Australia have been skyrocketing for 25 years and making it seem like ALL crime is going up, when a truer explaination would be that assaults get reported and prosecuted more nowadays because the culture is changing. Anyways, over-policing can even lead to a kind of self-perpetuating cycle where the target group ends up with more and more people in prison which breeds more hard-core criminals and drug-addicts, who commit more crme and crate a greater perception of criminality, which leads to more police focus, and so forth. Third, as kind of a flow-on from these first two things--letting other slip by, and overpolicing--it will usually create perceptions of racism and persecution which render overall policing less effective since a sizable chunk of the population sees you as racist and unfair at best, and downright ineffective and corrupt at worst. (edited by Arwon on 08-17-06 10:57 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Bass: Yeah, I wasn't assuming those numbers were for black Americans, I just wanted a concrete example to refer to instead of speaking entirely in abstractions. Poor wording on my part. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Vincentia High School near my hometown was built by the guy who designed Long Bay Correctional Facility. So it was, actually, quite prison-like.
That is all. |
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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
