Post deleted. Oh, the irony.
I _despise_ Leno's Tonight Show, but his standup is fantastic. Don't write him off until you've seen it.
Your claim that interracial marriage (miscegenation) was never systematically banned in this country is irrelevant in the face that gay marriage has never been systematically banned in this country either. The difference between gay marriage and interracial marriage is, the federal government actually HAS stepped in and declared that states don't have to recognize other states gay marriages. So what about norms? In the 1950's, _almost_ 100% of whites were against white-nonwhite "miscegenation," but ultimately by the 1960's it was decided that the laws violated the 14th Amendment. More people were against interracial marriage by the time it was recognized as constitutionally protected than are against gay marriage/civil unions right now.
During their respective administrations, the Bush twins were legal adults and Chelsea Clinton/Obama's daughters not.
environmental damage is an externality of fossil fuel usage. Carbon trading simply unhides the hidden costs. When fuel usage produces pollution, someone pays to clean it up whether or not there are carbon units. The carbon unit just makes it possible to bundle that cleanup cost with the fuel that causes the pollution instead of spreading it out and forcing government to do it. The essence of capitalism is efficient allocation of capital resources. Forcing everyone to pay for pollution cleanup in the form of taxes is an enormous market inefficiency. Carbon trading should reduce environmental regulation because it will be in every businesses best interest to reduce their production inefficiencies that result in costly pollution cleanup. Basically, everybody wins. Well, everybody except the shareholders and consumers of products that are currently externalizing the pollution cleanup of their products to all taxpayers.
So let me get this straight, you are going to abandon your stated values (setting aside differences with the President in the interest of national unity) because Democrats called your bluff? Or is it really just because a Democrat is in the White House and before that was all just a bunch of talk? It looks to me like you dumped your alleged values like a sack of bricks. Put your money where your mouth is and live up to your word. Politics aren't a game, you either have values that you stick to, or you change the rules of the game so that you always have the easy win. Which is it?
What he appears to be saying is that the rapid spread of life disproves the second law of thermodynamics which would predict entropy, UNLESS you have something in the universe fighting entropy. Well, the second law only applies to closed systems, life is restricted to Earth, and the Earth is not a closed system. We are constantly bombarded by energy from the sun that sustains and perpetuates life on Earth. The truth is, the argument really doesn't work anyway because entropy is concerned with net loss, and the rapid spread of life is actually an entropy accelerator, sort of like how fire burns energy faster than the simple kinetic energy transfer of a rockslide. If you look at a log as a closed system, introducing fire brings the log to an inert "entropied" state far faster than regular old decomposition, which is proof of the second law rather than refutation. Fire brings temporary "vibrancy" to the log at the cost of shortening the life of the log to a "dead" state. The fire is not creating energy, it is unlocking the energy contained within the chemical bonds. Once they are spent, there's no more. That's entropy. Again, with a given that the argument is restricted to the log itself (and a limited amount of oxygen.)
This is a good topic thread today, everyone is very polite!
I am not confusing it, I am just restricting my argument solely to PeterPike's equivalence between a claim that God wrote the Bible and that Napoleon wrote a particular note. My argument was that _disproving_ a claim that someone had divine inspiration while writing something is impossible, making verification of the "authorship" of the Bible by God categorically different from a regular old handwritten note by a human being.
Again, I want to be cautious and say that does not DISPROVE anything. One commonly accepted part of the Christian faith is that Truth can be revealed through revelation. A basic fact of Christianity is that no one is responsible for securing your own salvation from God except YOU. You may be called to evangelize, but the burden is on the person to accept it. Revelation is a unique personal proof that transcends fact, and if you know in your heart that the Bible is the Word of God, then no one can prove you wrong. But that "proof" is something that every person has to attain on their own. You can give testimony about revelation, but it's not the same thing to the person receiving it as having a revelation themselves.
To state it extremely simply, the mythological origin of Aryanism was that there was an original, single race of humans in ancient times, highly evolved in the moral, physical and intellectual sense. There was a cataclysm in their homeland (Hyperborea) that caused the downfall and dispersal of this race, with a corresponding devolution of these attributes the further away from the geographical center of the origin of this homeland and the descendents corresponding to the "races" you see today. Modern-day Aryans were people supposed to be the closest in every sense to this original race, and at the far end there were races that had devolved to the point that they were ideologically opposed to those original values, and so they had become, perhaps literally, "anti-humans." Guess who got that designation.
There is nothing wrong with your logic. He's accepting the authorship of both by applying the same extremely low standard. If you want to verify the authorship of a handwritten note by Napoleon, at the very least you can begin by comparing the handwriting, age, paper and ink qualities against known examples of legislation he signed or authored by him during his tenure as military commander or leader of France. If you want to, you can trace the paper trail all the way back to a body in a tomb.
That's what we call falsifiability. I can accept it as reasonable evidence if I at least in theory could somehow disprove the claim. There are ways that I could prove a handwritten letter was NOT by Napoleon. But there is no way to disprove that God personally guided hands and hearts of the scribes, translators and assemblers of the Holy Bible. The evidence for that is God speaking to your heart.
Everything is levels of confidence, but people don't just throw up their hands and say that nothing can ultimately be proven so everything is of equal veracity. I can guarantee you that if I worked at PeterPike's bank and all his money disappeared one day, he would not accept my claim that "God took it." Before he believed that, he would want some pretty strong evidence.
![[Avatar]](/images/avatar26.png){kind=avatar}
Medley