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Originally written by Right Angle Bracket:

—Alorael, who is unaware of any research done into polygamy genes. Surely it would be reasonable for a gene or several genes to control desire to have a single partner or many partners?

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Originally written by Keto-san:

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However, the assertion that human nature must be changed implicitly supports the vanguard theory (changed by whom?).

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It should be changed by the people at large. A great deal of the problem with lenin was that he failed quite dramatically at changing the mindset of the people (and stalin/kruschev didn't help any either), and what resulted was a government that was supported intellectually exclusively by the upper-class, whereas the lower-class was as mystified as a destitute petit-bourgeois in any first-world country could ever hope to be.

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After all, marxism is the darling of the overprivileged elite nowadays, not "the people."

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Make no mistake- I was born rich enough to get a decent education. Not that I am ashamed for that, because I consider an education something that all human beings should be afforded.

Although it's not as if the exploited (in this country alone, nevermind the ever-present third world!) have actually been exposed to many positive ideas. If the poor honestly don't want to change the world, it's going to be because they're so intensely jaded from being perpetually prostrate (and prostate as well), or because meritocracy's main lesson tells them to hate themselves for not succeeding, and if they hate themselves, then they certainly won't fight for their rights, now will they?

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It would seem that the masses prefer their opiates, religion and a miniscule chance of becoming fantabulously rich, to an optimal distribution of resources or the promise thereof. If the lower classes prefer those things to a Marxist society, I see no pressing need to change the status quo in that regard.

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Right. The slaves prefered living under their masters-- I say we get the national guard back home and have them work on a final solution to the negroe problem.

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EDIT: And as for what I mean by "the issue of solvency," I mean "questions as to whether or not communism will have solvency."

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Originally written by Ash Lael:

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Originally written by Keto-san:

If human nature is an impedement for the greatest good for all individuals, we must get rid of it.

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Isn't it only possible to eliminate human nature by eliminating humans? :confused:

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Originally written by Dikiyoba:

My state has the CIM, but that's about to go through another huge readjustment. I passed it during my sophomore year. Only a part of it is writing, though.

Dikiyoba is not graduating until the eleventh. Then it's one very short summer until Dikiyoba heads off to college.

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Originally written by Drew:

I haven't read it, but I can't imagine that it's any better than those Left Behind books, and no non-believers I'm aware of ever made a stink about those. People just need to cool out about this crap - it's fiction, fiction, fiction. That they feel threatened says a lot about the state of their own belief.

Reminds me a lot of what happened when The Satanic Verses came out. We're about two steps shy of our very own Christian fatwah here, folks! How sad it is.

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Originally written by Kingy:

I used to do Judo but gave it up when I realised that it wasn't doing me that much good. Then again in one year I put on 15kgs of muscle mass doing it. I really want to get into street fighting but unfortunitly it isn't all that easy to get into and the training is intense. And me being really lazy and intense training doesn't really seem that fun.

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Originally written by Kingy:

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Originally written by When Kangaroos Snorkel:

The network is called linksys, and it has no encryption or password protection. You just click on it, and it connects.

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Uhh...Where are you from exactly? Because that is the exact name of the one I used while I was staying in California.

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Originally written by Thuryl:

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Originally written by Kelandon:

For the record, archeological dating goes well beyond C-14 dating. If it were just C-14 dating, I wouldn't believe the dates either, because C-14 dating, by itself, is crappy on small time scales. It's good for millions of years, but it sucks for just a couple thousand years.

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Actually, it's the other way around; carbon dating is only useful for objects going back from a few thousand years to a few tens of thousands of years, because if something's been dead longer than that, the carbon-14 has decayed to the point that accurately measurable quantities are no longer present. Different radioisotope dating methods, like potassium-argon dating, are used for geological time scales.

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Originally written by URL=hotmail.com:
Hot Male[/URL]
Since everyone else has jumped in, I'll just argue about the one part which concerns me.

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Originally written by Major:

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What if I were to rephrase the offending statement as, "Come on you people should be able to distort a distorted theory wherein the stronger force the weaker to use their language."? There's absolutely no religion in there

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Oh, yes there is it's called "Chance".

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You only typed one sentence and I've already found the meaning hard to understand.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

The government is supposed to provide certain services that benefit everyone (roads, schools, etc.). These services cost money. That money has to come from somewhere, and there literally is not enough money among the lower-income earners to pay for all of it. Therefore, progressive taxation.

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Originally written by The Worst Man Ever:

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Originally written by PoD person:

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Originally written by Khoth:

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Originally written by PoD person:

I do think, though, that Western Europeans were not committing some horrible crime against humanity in taking the Native Americans' land.

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So if you want something someone else has, and you don't like the way they're using it, it's okay to take it for yourself by force?

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Well, yeah. Isn't that the moral principle behind the graduated income tax? Heh, I was waiting to be called on that; however, if it's ethically acceptable to redistribute conspicuously consumed wealth, it's the same to redistribute conspicuously unconsumed wealth.

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It sure is, if you're paying income tax directly to your neighbor and he gets to spend it as he pleases. If you're paying it to a government which is obligated to provide you certain services - not so much.

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Originally written by Khoth:

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Originally written by PoD person:

I do think, though, that Western Europeans were not committing some horrible crime against humanity in taking the Native Americans' land.

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So if you want something someone else has, and you don't like the way they're using it, it's okay to take it for yourself by force?

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No one would raise an uproar today if developers displaced a hippie commune to build housing, particularly if it were low-income housing or some worthy project of that nature

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Since it's the same thing, I take it then that you also wouldn't have a problem with a group of hippies knocking down your neighbourhood so they could have a commune there (so long as they give you the option of joining the commune, of course).

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[b]

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If a culture can be destroyed, it shouldn't be around anyways

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Do you mind if I come into your house and smash up your stuff? If you have anything that can be destroyed, it shouldn't be around anyways.

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TNR, though, cited several studies, and the only ones which spring to mind were weight-guessing contests, but there were others, which showed the aggregate guesses of crowds with some interest in getting the right answer often yielded estimates very close to the truth. I feel like the collective wisdom of a populace with more or less identical interests will always trump bureacracy.

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Except that weight-guessing is nothing like predicting terrorist attacks. Guessing someone's weight, everyone can judge roughly how heavy someone is relative to others, and people's systematic errors in converting that to an absolute scale can cancel out somewhat when you take an average.

Terrorism is different. Nobody has a clue where terrorists are going to strike next, and taking the average of several million "no ideas" (if you can even meaningfully extract such an average) doesn't help you at all.

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