At the risk of sounding snarky or disrespectful, I can't fail to notice how often people suffering from depression become all passionate and fiery when discussing the cause of (their) depression.
I wouldn't call Richard Dawkings close minded. Here's a man who abandoned a successful career in biology because he found contemplating God more rewarding.
Don't want to be the negative guy, but sometimes I wonder why people would spend their physical energy on gym equipment while you may just as well learn a construction skill that leaves a tangible result and has some use in the real world - like bricklaying, plastering walls or wiring electricity.
Just my 2 cents, if you enjoy your gym all the better for you. But I also think that many people give up because they find it boring.
Cassini and Richter had measured the parallax of Mars (and therefore the distance to Mars) a couple of years earlier. Using Kepler's law they could then deduce the distances to the other planets.
The Chinese room argument is actually needlessly convoluted. Just imagine a piece of paper on which three words are printed: "I AM SAD". Now is there anyone who believes that this piece of paper is actually feeling sad just because "it says so"? Of course not. Now, suppose we replace this piece of paper with a small tablet computer that changes its displayed "mood" over time according to some algorithm. Now in my opinion it is rather hard to imagine that all of a sudden consciousness will "arise" in the machine like some ethereal ghost and the tablet will actually start experiencing the displayed emotion. Because it's basically still the same piece of paper.
For Christ sake, this is a guy who writes a very useful text editor and hands it out for free. He's not the UN ambassador of global political reconciliation, as you seem to believe.
Your considerations may be true but there is simply no denying that there is some serious hypocrisy going on at the core of our value system. We fume when muslim terrorists bomb Paris, but we claim the right to bomb pretty much any muslim country whose government is not laying in bed with the West. The fact that we make some half-assed efforts to avoid "innocent" victims is no proof of moral superiority. The next time NATO blows up some wedding party in Afghanistan, I'd like to see the flag of Afghanistan projected on the opera house of Sidney.
Actually, both Israel and Palestines are a bit befuddled that their eternal little conflict has lost a good deal of importance to the rest of the world in view of the bigger events in the Mideast. Which probably is a good thing, since both parties were acting like the spoilt children of global attention.
> It's not intentional but I doubt ISIS sympathisers see the distinction.
I don't see the distinction either. If you drop a bomb and kill some people that you didn't intend to kill, you're still 100% responsible for those kills.
It is the saddest thing that we have found no better response to terrorism than limiting civil liberties and sending 18 year old boys with guns to foreign countries.
If you procrastinate a lot, it usually means that you really want to do something different with your life. Go find out what it is, rather than submitting yourself to all sorts of masochist self-discipline schemes.
This canard keeps popping up with such regularity that one start to wonder what kind of interest group is spinning this. The space around Chernobyl is still a dead zone. The only reason why animal life doesn't die out there is the permanent inflow of healthy animals from outside contaminated area.
> I think the fact that Obama won in 2012 supports my argument that most people see him as basically competent. Not bad. A reasonable moderate who did a moderately reasonable job.
My basic understanding of Obama's reelection in 2012 is that the liberal vote wasn't ready to admit how simply they had been conned by some clever marketing in 2008.
Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic under the spell of computers and internet and children are getting the worst of it. Computers are the last thing that kids under 12 need in a classroom. Teach them something that involves quiet focus, like 19th century cursive writing.
One of the reasons why poverty is so difficult to solve is that, in a way, poverty is a biological niche. Even if you could manage to lift everyone out of poverty, that niche will still be there, waiting to be filled again.
It's little more than a year ago that Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla by an ugly orchestrated cabal. When I read Mitchell Baker's vapid blog post [1] on the decision, filled with polite backstabbing and politically correct buzzwordery I understood that Mozilla has been taken over by politicians and that its decline is just a matter of time.
Your brain is probably the most subtle instrument in the universe and you're plain stupid if you're going to blast it with synthetic drugs the long term effects of which are still unclear. And for what? Most of you people are already brilliant just like that.
I hope the people will look back to the way the tobacco industry has killed thousands by ruthlessly effective marketing, intentionally making their product more addictive, spreading misinformation and lobbying against laws that were in the interest of public health. Can you think of any particular reason why "Big Marijuana" will behave better?