201–210 of 228 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your children carries your experiences?
If you raise them.
2) Raising a child doesn't give the child your experiences either. I have no memory of what my father experienced in his life based on him raising me. AFAIK it doesn't happen to other people either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A choice Hitch refusal to be cowed by the moronic and frivolous: http://youtu.be/HECI4QK_mXA
I love that clip. Not because I agree with him about Bush (I don't), but because he doesn't give a fuck that everybody in the room disagrees with him; in fact, I'd say he revels in it. A true badass contrarian.
The way I see the clip is: Hitchens (who I admire for a lot of things) was trying to soothe his bruised ego that he had been so colosally wrong about Bush. He was just doubling down on his massive error of judgment by continuing to support Bush. Claiming that nobody in a theater full of people he does not even know is not smarter than Bush is silly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"empirical evidence and the scientific knowing of reality" Not sure what you mean by this, do you really believe that science validates a specific view on what constitutes reality?
Science defines our best view of reality, period. And by best, I mean most accurate representation of objective reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You post a story. It gets voted up. It gets voted down. The site is never out of step with its users' interests, because it can't be. So simple, and yet somebody is always there to complain about what should or should not be. Why?
I don't think stories can get voted down (at least for me no down-arrow is displayed). In any case, I disagree with the "the people have spoken" argument. It boils down to "if you don't like it, then leave". It should be the other way round: if you want to discuss this, then use another forum. HN has a certain purpose, even if it's not completely well-defined. It follows that there are stories that should be deemed o…
Hitchens was essentially a Marxist (by his own admission) who was also in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the foreign policy it represented. So there was very little I agreed with him on. But I'm terribly upset about this and I'll tell you why. Because of his willingness to debate. I'd literally scan right wing talk radio schedules for his name because you just knew it would be a great show. In a world where s…
Anyone who knew Hitchens knows that "heaven" as depicted by cristianity is a "celestial North Korea, where the sole purpose is to praise the dear leader incessantly, compelled to love someone you fear (essence of sadomasochism). You'd think the Lord himself would get bored of this after a couple of billion years"... So, wishing him in heaven from another atheist as you say you are is really saying you don't know much…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eternal life holds no interest for me. Imagine living a million years, seeing and thinking all there is to see and think, then living a billion years after that. Then you realize that you're precisely 0% of the way to the finish line. Long after the heat death of the universe, a consciousness with nothing to cogitate. No thanks.
You're making a lot of assumptions there. The idea that there are finite number of possible thoughts is highly improbable given the number of things there aren't finite numbers of. If you argue from a base mechanics point of view (e.g. Your brain is basically a hard drive with n bits of storage an thus can only enter 2^n states) then you're assuming that in this hypothetical afterlife your physical limitations are ma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A free market system with socialist overtones can work wonderfully well. Just look at Northern Europe. Anything will work with Northern Europeans (or Mormons, in reference to another thread) so that doesn't prove anything. The key test is whether {something} works with cultures where other things fail.
Or maybe it's the other way 'round. Perhaps they chose a sensible system because they are rational, compassionate and civilized people. Come to think of it, that seems more likely now.
Only 100-70 years ago Sweden was a very classist society with quite severe internal conflicts (workers were gunned down by the military in an incident in the 30s for instance).
In the 17th century Sweden was an imperialist country dedicated to the bloody wars of several ambitious kings (Gustav II, Karl XII, etc). Supposedly some people in Germany still warn their kids of the Swedes...
So my point is that Scandinavia was not always a peace-loving hippie region dedicated to sensible socialism-light. That stuff is quite recent.
Hitchens was essentially a Marxist (by his own admission) who was also in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the foreign policy it represented. So there was very little I agreed with him on. But I'm terribly upset about this and I'll tell you why. Because of his willingness to debate. I'd literally scan right wing talk radio schedules for his name because you just knew it would be a great show. In a world where s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Noam Chomsky quite well articulates what so greatly annoys me in the use of term "marxist". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ It has hardly any relation to the original context or meaning of the writings of one Karl Marx.
This video is appallingly deceitful. E.g. where he argues that the USSR was not only not socialism, but in fact as far from it as possible. He deftly redefines the core idea of socialism to make it look superficially plausible. If socialism was ever about one bug thing, it was the collective ownership of the means of production . This was the slogan of all socialist movements, particularly Marxist socialist movements…
I'm inclined to give Chomsky the benefit of doubt here. As a small l libertarian I can totally relate to the idea of ruling elites who falsely claim to share your ideals but are actually in politics for money, sex and ego stroking.