Prrometheus

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What change? We have a trillion dollar pork bill getting bludgeoned through congress right now. Essentially the President said to congress "Just make it big, and make sure we have some token expenditures on energy subsidies. Otherwise, here's the checkbook. Yes, there's more than a thousand economists against this, but we're going to ignore them and listen to the ones who are Democrats."

So far, the new boss looks a lot like the old ones, except being black, young, and charismatic. plus ca change...

Also, sustainable energy is an engineering problem (unless by "sustainable energy" we mean proven technologies like nuclear, which leftists inevitably don't). No amount of Presidential hope-rays is going to make windmills or solar cells more efficient.

Rest assured, however, that we will give more money to corn farmers for ethanol, despite the fact that it is neither environmentally or economically sound as an energy source. Obama comes from a corn state.

Yes, I do hope he's marginally better than what came before. But this attitude that "I hope he's the one to make change stick", I just don't understand. There's only so much change you can make atop the world's largest bureaucracy.

When was the government ever run with an eye on efficiency?

He's just a journalist, dude, doing what journalists do.

The Ad Council is my least favorite government agency. It takes billions of dollars from the public. In exchange it produces such necessary propaganda as "if you smoke pot, you'll kill babies on accident".

Meanwhile, no Ad Council advertisement has ever been shown to make a quantitative difference in the social dynamic it was meant to address.

Every time I see an AdCoucil ad, I can't help but thinking that they could have refunded a few thousand people their tax money instead of providing me with this "public service".

It sometimes affects what I write, but not in a bad way. If I see a comment that I wrote has poor karma, or a critical response to a comment I wrote has high karma, I will often go back and flesh out my argument better.

At least on Hacker News, it seems to be a sign that my comment was poorly written rather than against popular wisdom.

The most strict libertarians I can think of are the anarcho-capitalists. Even they do not desire a society with the absence of laws, but rather they desire a market it law and law enforcement to replace the public monopoly.

You can argue about whether or not that is realistic, but to say they desire no laws is unfair.

And yes, the LP has an overabundance of socially challenged types. A rational man should be able to weigh arguments by their worth and not by their bearers.

The funds have the $billions. If you want a piece of it, you go to them.

Or perhaps financial firms should hire hackers to talk to investment funds and tell them how irrational they are being by refusing to do things remotely.

From what I remember, there was nothing in the article about gay marriage, or the pledge of allegiance. The author wasn't even particularly religious, though he hinted at deist tendencies. He certainly wasn't advocating religion, rather he was discussing the role it played in the lives of its adherents, and what that meant for popular atheist advocacy.

But from the reaction on this thread, he could have been linking to a Jack Chick tract. The anti-intellectualism on display is stunning. It looks to me that a Pavlovian anti-religious response is kicking in and a bunch of folks are spewing worn out canned responses orthogonal to the topic at hand. The reason this topic was dead-ed is surely more due to the juvenile discussion here than the thought-provoking article.

Should we refuse to listen to Christmas carols over the holidays because California passed proposition 8? Ought we boycott history lectures that mention popes because of Catholic stances on birth control?

If we temporarily drop our feelings about how people ought to act and examine how people actually do act, I promise you that we will learn interesting things. What happened to the geek ideal of learning about the world around us?

What happened to the inquiring mind? When I meet people that think different from me, I try to understand what motivates them, why they are different, what their history is like, what their culture is like, and how they see me. That shouldn't be hard for smart people like you and me, and I think it's a valuable thing to do.

The downside is that when you start to understand people, you start to lose enemies, and it is fun to have enemies.

Sadly, there are few places where one can have a good conversation these days. Most of the people who are capable of interesting discussion are old. It seems few young people are learning the art of entertaining ideas without changing their minds. Such a flat society it will be when every conversation must be an occasion for advocacy or agreement.

But maybe I am missing your point and you are just going to restate how gay people are okay and evolution is correct again. How thrilling.

I'm fascinated by how impossible it is for geeks to have an intelligent conversation about religion. This was a good article that many people chose to misread.

Yes, there is no invisible man in the sky, and gays are normal people. Evolution is real. Look how smart you are.

Now, there is a fascinating history of religion in human society probably dating back 500,000 years. To most people, it continues today. Yet we are so insecure that we cannot examine that tradition as inquiring minds while noone is demanding that we accept it for ourselves.

Such intolerance and misbehavior from intellectuals! How do they interact in our society, hating and condemning most whom they meet, totally unwilling to take others at face value? I do not know. I hope that I can be more generous.

Do you throw out your jets after one year?

My little firm did billion dollar deals, and we used private jets to flit our management teams from one investment fund to the next. Citigroup is much, much bigger. 400 hours (per year!) could easily be worth $50 million.

There were surely some bits worth celebrating in the thousands of years of prologue to manned spaceflight.

As far as I know, it is mostly restricted to certain strains of American Protestantism.

To throw away Christianity is to throw away Western Civilization and much of our heritage. I enjoyed this bit from TFA:

"Arguably, the highest achievements of the human species have been motivated by that instinctive spirituality just mentioned. The great cathedrals, the precious heritage of religious art and music, are not only monuments to religious belief, but more persuasive testimonies to and arguments for faith than the disputations of theology. Have you ever read the story of the conversion of St. Vladimir, the founder of the Russian Orthodox Church? He was, as the account goes, a pagan prince of the line of Rurik; and an enthusiastic pagan, having built several temples. Yet he was not quite satisfied with his religion, and agreed to hear deputations of Muslims, Jews, and Christians each deliver their respective sales pitches. The presentations of the first two were rather arid, but the Christians (who had come from Byzantium) put on by far the best show, high mass with all the smells and bells, rich vestments, singing, the whole nine yards. Vladimir was convinced - any religion that was so beautiful had to be the right one (it also didn't hurt that it had the least restrictive dietary rules, and no ban on booze). Accordingly, Russia became Christian, and Vladimir a saint - all on the basis of his aesthetic judgment.

I suppose these anthropological and aesthetic reasons explain why many people remain culturally Christian despite an abundance of doubts and discontents. They aren't willing to dismiss the spiritual out of hand; they see more benefit than detriment accruing to society from religion in spite of their doubts (as did Jefferson and Franklin); and they find Christianity aesthetically appealing (as did St. Vladimir). They are therefore unwilling to discard it in favor of the barren and austere horizon offered by the crusading atheism of a Dawkins. For my part, I'll wait to see whether Dawkinsianity produces anything equivalent to Chartres, Handel's Messiah or Mozart's Requiem, the Pietà or the Sistine ceiling. When it does we may re-evaluate it to see if it offers anything worthwhile."