I think if you've decided to rob a child's grave to make a skull bong, you're already high enough.

Tom Disch is crazy, crazy smart. He claims to have 98% (I think) recall of all conversations, and it's borne out by his books. He's far from my favorite writer - intelligence isn't everything when it comes to literature - but he's always interesting.

Well, almost. I didn't find these very funny, but it is always cool to see a writer interacting with his fans. I don't see how it has anything to do with Christianity, really - his answers mention little that's specifically Christian, as if they're serious at all.

Oh man, I am all for mad science as art. I want a whole exhibition of stuff like this.

This has nothing to do with pro-choice or pro-life because it wasn't human.

Although the Yale administration said it was a hoax immediately, Shvarts wrote an article for YDN after that saying that it is not a hoax and that the administration is wrong. The article came out the same day as the WaPo article, so they're operating off of older information there.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559

The rest of the piece after the initial assertion of veracity is the worst kind of postpostmodern baloney. It could have been written by a simple computer given a small vocabulary of buzzwords.

The administration was definitely lying when they said it was a hoax. That doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't, of course, but the artist still says she actually did it.

Wanking, drugs or church. Warhol was a daily communicant at St. Vincent Ferrer's.

#109 Scottfree, you clearly haven't read the Divine Comedy. In it, Dante goes down through Hell to the center of the Earth, where Satan is, and when he goes past the center gravity reverses, as on a globe. Then he come out on the Mount of Purgatory, on the antipodes of Jerusalem. Dante, like most people in the High Middle Ages and before, knew the Earth was round. (An decent illustration of Dante's "cosmology" which he probably didn't want to be taken literally anyway: http://www.darkstar1.co.uk/Taschenp41.jpg)

This appalling ignorance of history, literature and religion seems pretty common among crowds like this, much like the ignorance of science among the opposite side. Enjoy talking around each other, folks.

"One of the drawbacks to nuking the bejesus out of the Chinese mainland is the prevailing winds are gonna blow those glowing clouds eastward across the Pacific, right back over the good ole U.S. of A.
Can anyone think of another reason why we shouldn't nuke 'em from orbit?"

Just how far would it blow over the US? Because if it'd only hit California, I'm in.

The author made a rookie mistake: people who get elective cosmetic surgery are the sort of people who don't pay attention to their kids.

Brembs -

Thank you, that was fascinating reading.

That's great, Mark! Hope she has a great 108th year!

None in my family made it that far. I think 101 is the oldest.

I say we buy up all the bottles we can (for me, it'll be ~3) and send them to places where they have drought. The poor and the parched need "cachet" too!

Calvin: A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime, ... "high" art! The comic strip. Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work, ... "low" art. A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. ... "high" art.

Hobbes: Suppose I draw a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip?

Calvin: Sophomoric. Intellectually sterile. ..."low" art.

Are cakes usually not vegetarian? I'm finding it hard to think of a common bakery ingredient derived from dead animal flesh.

The exception being MEATCAKE, of course.
http://www.blackwidowbakery.com/gallery/main.php

Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and I'll show you the story of life. Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t'other. Now watch 'em! Old brother left hand, left hand he's a fighting, and it looks like love's a goner. But wait a minute! Hot dog, love's a winning! Yessirree! It's love that's won, and old left hand hate is down for the count!

The irony really is that, generally speaking, those students who are mature aren't having sex at a young age, and those who aren't mature enough are usually the ones who are (and rarely with someone their own age, either, as was suggested earlier - there's a high degree of girls with much older boys/adult males).

TENN -

Always good to hear from students like you. We teachers have just about as many horror stories as you do.

#35: "And really, fourteen isn't that young to be having sex, like, with other fourteen year olds I mean."

Met a lot of fourteen-year-olds? I don't know too many I would consider mature enough for that particular activity. Then again, I'm a high-school teacher so I might be jaded.

But yeah, I read this and my BS-meter automatically went off, especially considering it's from the Telegraph.

I think it's funny, all the atheists in this thread mocking religious values systems and then proceeding almost totally unexamined with a value system that privileges life over death. That seems like an choice with no more scientific a basis, and probably less, than most religious beliefs on the matter.

Antinous - I picked that up from your earlier post (How's Hadrian?). I was more referring to earlier posts that suggested the quality of his writing might be low. I get why you might not like him for his positions, although generally I don't pay much attention to those positions unless they crop up in the person's writings - perhaps the subtexts of Card's novels are closer to his real positions than he thinks.

Then again, I don't know if the boarding-school atmostphere of Ender's Game could really be considered the "straight world," heh.

Whoops! Meant Wyrms.

You guys might be down on Card because you only know the Ender series (and maybe the less known series, like Alvin Maker and Homecoming). I still like the first couple of Ender books. However, he did some fiercely original one-shots, like A Planet Called Treason and the magnificent Worms.

Don't know much about Niven (other than a like a couple of his books), but the readership might like to see Pournelle's reaction to 9/11 on his blog. It's entitled "What Is To Be Done":

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/war/whattodo.html

I remember it being...extravagant.

I'm also surprised at the general lack of chest-puffing in this thread. Usually I find everyone trying to one up the other in new ways to torture pedophiles, which is mostly a way of saying "I'd rather yell at someone everyone hates than try to change myself for the better."

Hopefully a few of you have seen Fritz Lang's film M - that's what I always think of when this topic comes up.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022100/

Zebraman is also a kickass Takashi Miike movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388556/

I don't get the mockery, either. This is wonderful. UP THE IRONS!

'Please reassure me that you're being deliberately thick. "Dr." and "Prof." don't come equipped with appearance cues. Let me put it for you this way. Calling a woman 'he' is like saying, "I know that you're really a man." Would you say to your doctor, "Gee, it sounds from your accent like you grew up in a trailer park."'

If I didn't say so to my doctor despite noticing such, and he did grow up in a trailer park, would I be being deliberately thick? Seems like you're privileging transgenders but not people from trailer parks.

I don't think the statement "He's pregnant." makes much sense, but I suppose we may as well reconstruct the entire definition of the human race along with language. It's not like any of us know what the hell we're ever talking about anyway.

That's it, I'm now a Stuckist.

Better buy some guns, then, so you can enforce your tolerance.

Mindy - Agreed 100%. What's always bizarre is that people think Hitler was an aberration, especially Americans, when our country sterilized more of the "genetically inferior" than any other country except Sweden. The US sterilized some 60,000 people, many of whom were not even mentally handicapped, like Carrie Buck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Buck). Hitler just took the popular conception of eugenics and combined it with the rest of the most horrible thought-cancers of the day, like fascism and the worst remnants of the industrial revolution (what are concentration camps, after all, except very efficient factories for extermination). He sterilized 400,000 of the supposedly handicapped, and killed many more. Then he took age-old antisemitism and merged it with Social Darwinism, which meant Jews were killed not for their religion but their race, which meant among the six million are those who are many who are by religion Catholic, Protestant and atheist. Trying to find a cause for Hitler's eugenics programs is somewhat meaningless, as there's always the question of whether a person is just using such theories as a mask for what he wants to do regardless, even if the crimes are appropriate to the age. What is certain is that those Western eugenics programs still legal during WW2 were quickly repealed after the Holocaust was revealed.

Mindy mentioned Sir Francis Galton, who interestingly was a cousin of Darwin's. However, little in Darwin's writings supports this superior vs. inferior dichotomy - it's that common misconception that natural selection selects for the "best" or the "strongest." Science, as its current popularizers often say, doesn't kill (or sterilize) anyone (except in rare cases like Mengele). It's its tools and technologies that do so, and so like theology, literature, philosophy and the rest, it's all peachy and innocent until people get their hands on it.

Saw a new fish decal the other day to beat all fish decals. It said "Freud" inside and the fish's head was shaped to look like, ahem, another type of head.

Considering most of FSM's supporters are against the installation of the Ten Commandments at courthouses on First Amendment grounds, yet claim that FSM is a religion in order to argue against creationism in schools, this seems rather cutesy, snarky and contradictory, which is all FSM is as far as I can tell.

Now to find that orbiting teapot and smash it...

I would only approve of this if he gave the robot wheels and an AI, then got a gun himself and set up a robot-human deathmatch arena. Eat lead, Johnny 5!

Also, I think it might be more courageous to welcome what life you have left rather than kill yourself, but whatever.

Gandalf23, you're making me proud to be a Texan.

So if someone breaks into your house, are you planning on asking him whether he's there merely to steal your $150 TV or also to kill you or a member of your family?

That's why people should be allowed to attack and, if necessary, kill trespassers.

This is the country which gives out Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, after all. I wouldn't be surprised to see it go into effect very soon.

Troilus and Criseyde is just really really good Greek fanfic, after all, and the Canterbury Tales is Dante fanfic, and Dante's Divine Comedy is Vergil fanfic, and Vergil is Homer fanfic, and Homer is Zeus fanfic, and Zeus is Jesus fanfic...

#1 - actually, there were numerous performances of Romeo and Juliet, mostly in the Restoration era (17th century), where the duo did not die at the end. Earlier ages often had much less of a problem changing an author's work for performance or republishing. It's only in the last century that the obsession with plagiarizing, authorial intent and extreme copyright has caught on.

Is it illegal to tell y'all I'm on the list?

I am, as well as everyone with my very common name.

Is this worse than the organizations that intentionally had Heidi Fleiss or Dennis Hof on?

SteveKM - the church DOESN'T have 600 million, at least not in liquid assets. What happens whenever those large settlements are levied is that the church has to sell a lot of its land and close a lot of institutions, like schools, monasteries and parishes - many of which are the ways in which it does try to help the poor.

That doesn't absolve them of #1. I can only hope that the media attention and the lawsuits will do what moral rectitude should have, and end the cover-ups.

I don't buy the scam hypothesis, though. If the priests themselves were making millions instead of, as they mostly do, living communally in small houses or apartments, working 60+ hours a week, and the like. They could make a lot more working in the secular world, and a LOT more if they joined a different religion or made their own (ah, L. Ron).

I'm probably the closest thing you get here to a rabid true believer, as I think the list is pretty great but also don't mind the abuse of my Church when it's warranted.

Watch out for reporting on the Vatican or Vatican officials (this is not an official pronouncement, by the way, just one guy in an interview); it's almost always wrong, mistranslated or misunderstood. This one seems to have even more variance than most. No one seems to agree on what the seven sins are, or even if there are seven - some have no numbering at all.

There're at least four different varieties on the subject of pedophilia, too, since it came up in many of the comments. The original post doesn't mention it in the list, which is odd. A few do that, and a few just have it as one on the list. The BBC and the AP go into more detail:

The BBC is openly hostile, as above: "He also named abortion and paedophilia as two of the greatest sins of our times. The archbishop brushed off cases of sexual violence against minors committed by priests as "exaggerations by the mass media aimed at discrediting the Church".

The AP has "Closer to home, Girotti was asked about the many "situations of scandal and sin within the church," in what appeared to be a reference to allegations in the United States and other countries of sexual abuse by clergy of minors and the coverups by hierarchy.

The monsignor acknowledged the "objective gravity" of the allegations, but contended that the heavy coverage by mass media of the scandals must also be denounced because it "discredits the church.""

I'd like to see a direct translation instead of soundbites, since lack of context never helped anyone except the news media, but very little gets translated. Oh, for primary sources...

Teresa -

I didn't mean to give short shrift to the others, just meant that the current hipster crowd is into him because of the Lethem relationship. Heck, I even did my undergrad thesis based on the similarities between Borges and Dick found in that LeGuin snippet that gets replicated on all the Vintage Dick (yes, yes, haha) editions. But even a decade ago or less I could always rely on finding a few of his novels in used book stores, and not until recently have they vanished, which seems to me to match up well with Lethem's prizes and of course Hollywood's rediscovery of him. The others you mentioned deserve all the credit in the world for bringing him back and getting him republished - but I think Lethem is the reason he's getting stolen.

All right, I dunno how that ended up here, since I didn't even have this thread open. Eh.

The Institute for the Future? Is that, like, the whole future? I didn't know it was such a powerful voting bloc.

I skipped D&D, yet managed to hit most of the rest of the flowchart. Maybe I'm even more antisocial than I thought.

Especially because I'm in all 7 of the No's on Furcon.

Dick is one of my favorites, and I absolutely know one reason why he's among the most stolen. It's because most of the editions from 30 or 40 years ago are nearly impossible to find with the Lethem-driven renaissance (and the fact that most of 'em got burned in the time between), and the new editions are pricey and rarely resold. A number of the other authors up there seem to be in the same position - most of their cheap original editions can't be found because they went through a long period of unpopularity, and are now resurgent.

So who's got a first printing of Dr. Bloodmoney I can buy for .50? C'mon...

I don't have any problem with this, per se - anyone trying to help those less fortunate is probably better than me - but I find that this endeavor and the free laptop project and those like it don't take into account the reality of the situation in most of these countries. Laptops are useless when what you don't have food, potable water, shelter and defense.

The problem is that, while we received computers at a time when we were more or less ready to incorporate them gradually into our daily routines, these countries are in a vastly different developmental state and need the sorts of things we needed at that stage. Know what would really help Subsaharan Africa? Air conditioning, no joke.

It's pretty clear, but for those who don't know French, it says "Some people pretend that students don't have problems with housing...Build housing for students!"

Searching for irony...searching for irony...irony found!

@Russnelson

The Founders put Freedom of Religion in the Constitution to protect religions from the government, not the other way 'round. It's just a bonus that it (usually) works the other way, too.

Totally agreed on the part about business. Not sure if an amendment would be exactly the way to go, but progressively working to separate government and business would be nice. How we'd regulate anything would be a question, among many others.

I suppose it's an additional incentive not to get in a wreck.

Oh yeah, I've never seen "tendentious" spelled "tendencious" although it's listed as a correct spelling in the dictionary. Is that British?

"Why should the incompetent hold power over the competent?"

Let's phrase statements so that they mandate tautological answers!

The obvious answer is that they shouldn't, of course. But the unassumed elitism of Objectivism splits all human beings into two categories - the incompetent ("looters") and the competent. Rand and other Objectivists play language games to bias the approach to their already decided categories. Incompetent and competent at WHAT, is my question. I'm reminded of the scientific experts in the UK arguing for eugenics - sterilization of the mentally "incompetent" - and a certain priest said, "I'm a moral expert, and I find you all to be morally incompetent!" Elitism is stupidly polarizing, and rarely takes into account the nuances (this is not relativism I'm arguing!) of human existence and behavior. So yes, if all you care about is material success, then of course the economically competent should rule the economically competent. But if we notice that there are other ways to define human value (and additionally that the multiplicity of such definitions argues for a fairly wide definition, such as species-wide) and additionally that those who most want power are those least likely to do well with it, then, I will say that I am against Objectivism, its oversimplified values, and its unnoticed assumptions.

"Why shouldn't the good be recognized as such?"

Define "good" in a way that no one can disagree with you.

Oh hey.

I'm all for accuracy, but most Objectivists tend to look like this:

http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/Horse_with_blinders_small.jpg

I'm sure you look very well, as long as you're looking in the direction you want to look.

punk is dead

what waht

Who is Cory Doctorow?

My problem with Ayn Rand, and I read her in high school too, is that she can't write a novel, and yet wrote many of them now considered classics. She gives a bunch of paper-thin characters and lame plots where the good guys are all good, bad guys are all bad, and everything in the world works out exactly the way she wants it to. That's not literature, it's not even philosophy - it's just bad, boring propaganda. I'm so glad I read a 50-page radio speech from John Galt, too.

However, I know one died-in-the-wool Objectivist, and she's a wonderful person. Not at all a psychopath and likely smarter than anyone here calling Objectivists stupid. People are more complex than their beliefs, or one of their beliefs. That does not, however, stop anyone from calling out Objectivism on more objective grounds. If it's bad philosophy, and I think that, like all other philosophies that promote elitism, it is, then you can say so without stooping to idiotic ad hominems.

Now Bioshock? Objectively awesome.

Casanova is completely amazing, perhaps the best comic running right now (since Morrison only writes All-Star Superman when the hash aliens tell him to).

Slight correction - that should read Gabriel Ba (artist).

So does this mean Jesus was pissed at himself?

\oo/ |||| \oo/
OO

We should just make personal responsibility illegal.

The Mutter Museum is fantastic, and if anyone here ever visits St. Petersburg, tear away from the Hermitage for a bit to check out Kuntskamera:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancey/sets/72057594063988432/

Congrats!

Gal Civ II is hardly big budget. It doesn't even come close to the major companies' budget even in the underpowered gaming industry.

I'm definitely a supporter of no DRM, but part of me wonders whether the no-DRM model is as sustainable as people say, since the big reason Gal Civ II did so well is that it got lots of publicity for lacking DRM in an otherwise DRM-full industry, plus the much-publicized StarForce attack noted earlier. When/if DRM-free becomes the norm, games like Gal Civ II won't stand out as much and won't do nearly as well.

This is pretty serious awesome. In the future children will be growing pieces of their own bodies and throwing them at each other instead of foodfighting or egging. I predict it!

Also, there is only religious opposition to embrionic stem cell research, which this is not. And since researchers have already found a way to create embrionic stem cells without destroying embryos, the issue is rapidly becoming a non-.

#17 - Wll, y sm t b rgng tht thy hv n rght t cll n frcn-mrcn spd.

Hr.

Next up: John McCain walks onstage to the dulcet tones of Turbonegro.

Aw, nothing from The Shield? I figure showing dead naked women splattered with semen would at least get ONE complaint.

Actually, it's because that show hasn't been done yet by this site. There aren't necessarily more complaints about sex than violence - it's just that all of the shows on the site, with one exception, are not violent shows (Simpsons, Daily Show, etc). The one exception is Law & Order: SVU, and there the majority of the complaints are about violence. A few are even the polar opposites of commenters #9 & #3 here.

Still, I'll never forget the day my stuffy university president introduced the showrunner of The Shield and then sat down to watch a couple episodes. I don't think he was warned what he was in for. So I hope this site does The Shield next.

Thirding Black Books. Funniest show I've ever seen.

I'm a total book fetishist. I worked in a bookstore for a few years, too, and it only augmented my obsession because of all the free and bargain deals I got there. Not saying Orwell is wrong so much as there may be other experiences out there, and mine is one of them.

That's rucked up all right.

That's why, now, all that New Hampshire has going for it is a hatred of seatbelts and three inches of novelty coastline.

- stolen from Jon Hodgman

Fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours. Then you shall have your revenge.

Bah, no one actually wears anything that goes down those runways. I can barely think of anything more vestigial to anything of human value than the world of high fashion.

It's massively unlikely that cloned humans will be identical because of epigenetics. Even if the DNA may be the same, changes occur even before birth that determine the eventual person, so hordes of Epsilons or whatever aren't really feasible, at least with cloning as it now stands.

@ #15 - You're right, there's no genocide occurring against homosexuals (at least in America). However, the example of abortion shows that people are much less squeamish about making these decisions when they don't have to put a face to it. Think about what would really happen if most parents got to decide which box to check on their BabyCo application form, [] heterosexual or [] homosexual. As was said, evolution built sexual reproduction best it could - which also probably means that cloning, like in vitro, will never become the usual way of reproduction for humankind.

#16 - I don't know of any experts, on either side of the debate, that deny that clones will have souls or be people (although they may not be treated as complete persons by a society that will necessarily shift its understanding of what a human being is). After all, the same could be said of in vitro babies. The concern for most religious people is the state of the souls of those who make the decision to clone.

Moon, doing a quick google search for the arguments against cloning will get you a wealth of reasons. The genetic therapy Jeff's talking about (which is not just a concern in cloning) is less about avoiding Perfect human beings, as if you could even define what a perfect human being is, as allowing human beings to play God/process of natural selection and eliminate certain genetic strains according to their own choice. Doubtless the first to go would be mental retardation, followed closely by homosexuality.

There're numerous other arguments, and the one I find particularly important is that once you start manufacturing human beings, human beings become a commodity rather than a protected form of life. The societal definition of a human being will shift, and probably in negative ways.

This assumes, of course, that science can ever be stopped, which seems unlikely.