Posts by Billyblobber

182

The Case for Theism

by FusionTheism in

"theism" here means "belief in a god" or "the worldview that an intelligent designer created the universe and life.

" ("god" here means a being with a mind who initiated and/or wound-up the universe, and designed life on earth)the most common claim that i see atheists making on twitter, is that "no evidence" exists in support of belief in a god.this post will remove any excuse atheists have for claiming "no evidence exists" in support of an initiator.

atheists can still reject this evidence as "weak," but they cannot truthfully say it does not exist.now, it is true that we do not have "observable, repeatable, falsifiable, empirical, scientific" evidence conclusively proving that an initiator exists, but we do have many lines of philisophical, experiential, and logical evidence.and... here... we... go:1:) many leading scientists, including stephen hawking, say that the space-time-matter universe had a beginning at the singularity/big bang.

Billyblobber

Uh, that backs up what cofty said, with the 6.9 out of 7 sure about his beliefs that you forgot to highlight in red.

182

The Case for Theism

by FusionTheism in

"theism" here means "belief in a god" or "the worldview that an intelligent designer created the universe and life.

" ("god" here means a being with a mind who initiated and/or wound-up the universe, and designed life on earth)the most common claim that i see atheists making on twitter, is that "no evidence" exists in support of belief in a god.this post will remove any excuse atheists have for claiming "no evidence exists" in support of an initiator.

atheists can still reject this evidence as "weak," but they cannot truthfully say it does not exist.now, it is true that we do not have "observable, repeatable, falsifiable, empirical, scientific" evidence conclusively proving that an initiator exists, but we do have many lines of philisophical, experiential, and logical evidence.and... here... we... go:1:) many leading scientists, including stephen hawking, say that the space-time-matter universe had a beginning at the singularity/big bang.

Billyblobber

Outlaw, nobody needs or really tries to prove "No God."

The point is, basically, the accrued rational evidence for any god is so terrible as to be stupid, and doesn't pass any sort of reasonable muster. Nobody has to prove something with practically no evidence "isn't." It's like saying, "people who don't believe in Leprechauns can't prove that there really aren't Leprechauns."

When it comes to specific gods, then some people like to poke holes in the logic/evidence for them. The Christian God needs centuries worth of apologetics to TRY and make any amount of sense, and it gets worse the more we find out about science and history. Then, it's saying "your god is stupid and makes no sense, I can show you why with logical reasons/factual evidence."

25

Would you like to live for ever on earth?

by fulano in

i was discussing this topic with two friends of mine, ex jws, a few nights ago.

i think it would be boring after a while.

you can't smoke, have to drink with moderation (difficult in europe with all the wines).

Billyblobber

Not under JW rule, but outside of it, definitely. Living forever with other people means that people would also progress and invent things and also offers the possibility of space traveling and settling and all new things to discover and appreciate. Also, you tend to "forget" things that makes revisiting them fun (for instance, you can easily forget a movie you haven't seen in 10 or 20 years and look at it almost through new eyes the next time you see it).

The JW paradise sounds absolutely terrible, though, and many of them know it as well. That's why they always go "trust in Jehovah to make us like all this stuff we don't like" when they start talking about it.

184

Why are people burning their city to the ground in Baltimore? How doe Looting and Mob Violence Help?

by PokerPlayerPhil in

it's hard enough for businesses to enter these areas the government once had to offer up tax breaks to service them.

in watts, california it took decades for city residents to get a grocery store after the thugs burned their businesses to the ground.

you can see the insanity taking place, when you allow mobs and fools to burn building down nothing good comes from it.

Billyblobber

Here's an excellent interview by The Wire's David Simon that gives a bit of history and nuance to the way that the Baltimore PD is run, and why stuff like this happens, for anyone that wants to read it:

http://www.vice.com/read/david-simon-talks-about-where-the-baltimore-police-went-wrong-429

Quote:

But the other thing that gets you beat is if you fight. So the rough ride was reserved for the guys who fought the police, who basically made—in the cop parlance—assholes of themselves. And yet, you look at the sheet for poor Mr. Gray, and you look at the nature of the arrest and you look at the number of police who made the arrest, you look at the nature of what they were charging him with—if anything, because again there's a complete absence of probable cause—and you look at the fact that the guy hasn't got much propensity for serious violence according to his sheet, and you say, How did thisguy get a rough ride? How did that happen? Is this really the arrest that you were supposed to make today? And then, if you were supposed to make it, was this the guy that needed an ass-kicking on the street, or beyond that, a hard ride to the lockup?

I'm talking in the vernacular of cops, not my own—but even in the vernacular of what cops secretly think is fair, this is bullshit, this is a horror show. There doesn't seem to be much code anymore—not that the code was always entirely clean or valid to anyone other than street cops, and maybe the hardcore corner players, but still it was something at least."

184

Why are people burning their city to the ground in Baltimore? How doe Looting and Mob Violence Help?

by PokerPlayerPhil in

it's hard enough for businesses to enter these areas the government once had to offer up tax breaks to service them.

in watts, california it took decades for city residents to get a grocery store after the thugs burned their businesses to the ground.

you can see the insanity taking place, when you allow mobs and fools to burn building down nothing good comes from it.

Billyblobber

Yes, race becomes a quick and convenient proxy to judge class and affluence which can easily be confused with racism when it isn't even though the bias appears to be against a race.

But...that is racism. Stereotyping someone because of their race/ethnicity is racism. If a cop sees a black or hispanic person and makes a default gut assumption that they're more dangerous, and/or treats them differently because of race based assumptions, it's racism, because they're stereotyping based on skin color. That's one of the big problems with police in America (regardless of the race of the officer in question).

People often conflate things like racism and sexism with assumptions that it's calling someone a "bad person" by doing so. This is not true at all, in fact, almost everyone probably has aspects of racial or sexual bias somewhere, it's almost unavoidable because of humans evolving to classify things by gut, based on what they see and experienced previously.

The problem, and what people try to fight, is when this happens in a way that widely negatively affects people. When you have an institution like the police , making snap gut decisions based on what someone looks like, it can unfairly screw over people, and results in skewed treatment among large groups of people. That is what needs to be fixed.

This individual case in Baltimore has nothing in it where there can be a clear "they did this because of him being black" issue though. Him being black led to the position in which he was in (given the history of Baltimore and why so many black people are the underclass there), which can segue into the larger narrative, but this is not something that I would place more on a horribly run and managed police department as opposed to racial lines.

184

Why are people burning their city to the ground in Baltimore? How doe Looting and Mob Violence Help?

by PokerPlayerPhil in

it's hard enough for businesses to enter these areas the government once had to offer up tax breaks to service them.

in watts, california it took decades for city residents to get a grocery store after the thugs burned their businesses to the ground.

you can see the insanity taking place, when you allow mobs and fools to burn building down nothing good comes from it.

Billyblobber

Well, it's not just a conflation. Many police departments that deal with those types of inner cities are either taught or learn from peers or experience with peers to view things through a racial lens. If police take the viewpoint that they are "at war" with criminals (which is a huge viewpoint in the inner city among police), and most of the criminals are a certain race, then they will have the same problems as soldiers, in which some just relate the race/ethnicity of the country in which they're fighting as the enemy and gradually dehumanize them (including civilians), or view them as "others" in their own minds, which causes them to treat them differently. You're dealing with natural human things like selection biases and snap judgments, that are dangerous when the people doing so are often armed, and can get away with much more than a normal citizen due to being more protected in various ways (by other police, by prosecutors who depend on police for convictions and don't want to get on their bad sides, etc.).

That's the "racism" that is talked about in that context - a large portion of people that harbor an automatic snap shift in how they view black/latin/whatever people due to working in areas where those people are the underclass, and thus, more likely to be criminals. It doesn't mean a default hatred, it's a difference in how one approaches or treats someone based on race, including assumptions of criminality or danger. Even if it's UNDERSTANDABLE, that does not make it RIGHT for those that are victims of it.

However, since police departments are institutions, something can be done DIRECTLY about this. Better training, forcing at least some education about basic socioeconomic theories to police, better oversight, not letting prosecutors with conflicting interests handle grand juries in those types of cases, not letting people with obvious psychological issues carry guns around as an arm of the state, etc. That's the kind of change that can be forced if enough of the populace turns against it.

184

Why are people burning their city to the ground in Baltimore? How doe Looting and Mob Violence Help?

by PokerPlayerPhil in

it's hard enough for businesses to enter these areas the government once had to offer up tax breaks to service them.

in watts, california it took decades for city residents to get a grocery store after the thugs burned their businesses to the ground.

you can see the insanity taking place, when you allow mobs and fools to burn building down nothing good comes from it.

Billyblobber

Also, the reason so many related charges are being brought up is that in other, similar cases, many police officers get off on technicalities because the exact charge cannot be proven. It means that the prosecutor feels that the officers could be proven at fault of one or some of these charges, and it's the best way to get something to stick.

The racial makeup of Baltimore is too tied to class to make a straight racial distinction in this particular case. It gets drawn into the larger narrative, of course, because race and economics are so aligned in America, but the crux of the protests in this particular issue is that Baltimore's police is horribly managed and corrupt, from all reports.

As was pointed out before, many of the industrial cities like Baltimore/Detroit/etc. in the U.S., that were building a middle class based on industry specifically barred black people from buying property in up and coming suburban neighborhoods until the end of the 20th century, forcing them to basically rent in the inner city and creating large inner city ghettos when the industry and money base left the cities (and inner city education, public services, etc. dropped along with this as well). Thus, while most of the negative incidents in Baltimore focus on black people, it's also because the entire inner city is basically poor and black - and aligns directly with socioeconomic issues.

The officers being black has absolutely nothing to do with anything, no matter what the case is, anyway. When people say that police unfairly target and punish black people, they are talking about the institution of the police in America, and are not making a distinction between the race of the officers in question.

184

Why are people burning their city to the ground in Baltimore? How doe Looting and Mob Violence Help?

by PokerPlayerPhil in

it's hard enough for businesses to enter these areas the government once had to offer up tax breaks to service them.

in watts, california it took decades for city residents to get a grocery store after the thugs burned their businesses to the ground.

you can see the insanity taking place, when you allow mobs and fools to burn building down nothing good comes from it.

Billyblobber

Also, the Baltimore police department has paid something like 6 million in the last 4 years for police brutality lawsuits. They have a horribly run police department, which has actually become at least a little more known in public since The Wire's popularity (David Simon created the show based on his experiences as a police reporter - it became one of the highest reviewed shows of all time), and known a bit more among the mainstream thanks to these recent events.

Note that this is the PAID amount, not things that were alleged but not proven, or things completely swept under the rug, or accepted as par for the course. People are seriously wondering why people would be protesting about that?! What in the world?

184

Why are people burning their city to the ground in Baltimore? How doe Looting and Mob Violence Help?

by PokerPlayerPhil in

it's hard enough for businesses to enter these areas the government once had to offer up tax breaks to service them.

in watts, california it took decades for city residents to get a grocery store after the thugs burned their businesses to the ground.

you can see the insanity taking place, when you allow mobs and fools to burn building down nothing good comes from it.

Billyblobber

That should answer the question in the original post.

Peaceful protests go unnoticed.

The Civil Rights movement in the 60s wasn't much different either. People marched peacefully, it was barely covered by the media, and, instead, things like the Black Panthers/Malcom X were overplayed as fearmongering, or every time a riot erupted (normally, at that time, spurred on by the police), THAT was pushed in media, and just gave more flames to the fire for people that viewed them as animals in the first place.

The biggest/best turning point in public opinion wasn't "peaceful marches," - it was that some law enforcement was dumb enough to attack the peaceful marches on camera and turn public sentiment on the side of those marching. That's probably not going to happen in this climate, so we're basically stuck with "peaceful marches = nothing happens, riots break out, people view them as animals...er...thugs."

184

Why are people burning their city to the ground in Baltimore? How doe Looting and Mob Violence Help?

by PokerPlayerPhil in

it's hard enough for businesses to enter these areas the government once had to offer up tax breaks to service them.

in watts, california it took decades for city residents to get a grocery store after the thugs burned their businesses to the ground.

you can see the insanity taking place, when you allow mobs and fools to burn building down nothing good comes from it.

Billyblobber

That "he broke his own spine while in the van flinging himself around in there" story was one of the most ridiculous things I've heard from this whole thing, and it's amazing that so many people (not isolating here, around the Internet in general) tried to cling to that as some sort of "actual reality."

It's also rather crazy that 10,000 people were peacefully protesting there for a week because of a tipping point of the many, many documented cases of police brutality there over the years, and 2 city blocks erupt into chaos for an afternoon, and THAT'S what some people and a lot the media decide to focus on instead. The peaceful protests were barely covered that whole time - instead, the two blocks were shown over and over again on the news and on front pages the second it started.

On top of that, the chaos started when the police cut off access to public/school transportation in the middle of protests, as kids/teens were being let out of school, leaving them all on the streets and forced to find their own way home, basically, starting a chaotic situation in that area. Which was relatively contained, with residents and even some of the rioters helping to clean up after the next day.

Finally:

The death of Freddie Gray was a homicide, and six Baltimore police officers now face criminal charges that include second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, Baltimore chief prosecutor Marilyn J. Mosby says.

Mosby announced the charges Friday morning, citing her office's "thorough and independent" investigation and the medical examiner's report on Gray's death. She said warrants were issued Friday for the officers' arrest.

The city's recently elected state's attorney, Mosby detailed a range of charges against the officers, with offenses ranging from one count of second-degree murder and four counts of involuntary manslaughter to assault and misconduct in office.

The most severe charges are leveled against Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., identified as the driver of the van that transported Gray to a police station. The charges against Goodson include second-degree depraved heart murder, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison.

The investigation by the prosecutor's office found there had been no reason to detain Gray — and that his arrest was in itself illegal, Mosby said. She said the knife that police officers found on Gray turned out to be legal.

After announcing the charges, Mosby noted her own ties to the police community — including her mother, father and grandfather, who were police officers. She thanked officers who are committed to serving the community.

We'll have more details from the announcement and any documents released by the prosecutor's office.