Dantius

Batman's superpower: tons of money, mechanical genius, and a military-industrial complex under my control.

Tim Minchin is speaking?

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Who knows about Gingrich. His campaign looks credible now, but remember the time last year that multiple top campaign staff resigned because THEY thought the campaign was a joke? Was that before or after he decided that a cruise to Greece with his wife was a good way to spend campaign donations?

Yeah, it's the UDF to match Sagan's quote.

If this is about that neutrino thing at CERN, then that was actually shown to be a calculation error a little while ago, so Einstein's still safe (until they discover the Charon relay!). On a semi-related note: Click to reveal.. (Bad Dantius!) The bartender says "We don't serve your kind here". A neutrino walks into a bar.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan It's gonna make the astrophysicists cry, but as long as they've studied something else (and not something completely useless like, say, classics), they can still be functioning members of society. Hey, zingers against liberal arts majors is my job here! You trying to put me out of work?

Originally Posted By: Lilith No sane person would claim that you should be allowed to set up a building that treats every illness with nothing but prayer and call it a hospital. The responsibility of medicine, always and everywhere, is to act in the best interests of the patient while respecting the patient's autonomy, regardless of the doctor or the institution's own beliefs. That's a nice sentiment, but unfortunately, some people are anything but sane when it comes to medicine.

Originally Posted By: Kelandon You know, "uterine contents" seems marginally less awkward to me than "zygote/embryo/fetus." Well obviously you'd select the proper adjective depending on whether you were discussing the morning after pill or regular abortion or partial birth or whatever. I just don't understand why, when one side in the debate obviously has the medical facts and logic and evidence on their side, they would choose to throw it away bring down the debate to the level of the opposition and resort to euphemisms instead.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S The disagreements between the parties are largely about IDEOLOGY -- either they disagree about what our goal should be (e.g., abortion law, entitlements like social security) or they agree in theory about the goal, but not what we need to do to reach it (e.g., revenue from taxes). Republicans are not "damaged" by pro-choice policies and Democrats are not "damaged" by pro-life policies; the policies affect women and uterine contents from both parties. Not gonna lie, but "uterine contents" has got to be the most sanitized euphemism for "zygote/embryo/fetus" I've ever heard in my life. I mean, I'm hugely pro-choice myself, but there has got to be a point at which we quit it with the Newspeak and just use the proper medical terminology to discuss the issue in a unbiased manner, and I'm going to have to draw the line at "uterine contents" as the pro-choice equivalent of "pre-born child", which is just as ridiculous.

Originally Posted By: Master1 (Sorry if this is a tad late, but I used to make unsupported claims. I've been thrashed too many times to do it as much, and now I find myself demanding evidence for claims.) I used to make unsupported claims like you, but then I took an ar- [ducks] Seriously, though, if he wants to interpret the series as a metaphor for religion or politics based on parallels that he sees, how is that a problem? If he can convince others of that, good for him, but I don't see how it's possible to be "wrong" about something like that like some here seem to be implying...

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S I have to say, I find it a little appalling the way people toss around condescending statements about people from the other party, somehow assuming that they make sense to everyone else. They don't. How is it not appropriate to refer to someone who refers to himself as a "definer of civilization" and "leader of civilizing forces" as a megalomaniac? I mean, statements like: Originally Posted By: Newt Gingrich I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I'm doing it [...] Oh, this is just the beginning of a 20-or-30-year movement. I'll get credit for it... pretty much fit Originally Posted By: Wikipedia's definition of megalomania [A] psycho-pathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of power, relevance, or omnipotence. Megalomania is characterized by an inflated sense of self-esteem and overestimation by persons of their powers and beliefs. to a T. I mean, it's not really very nice (then again, neither is Gingrich), but it's also pretty indisputably true.

Tangential: I just found a collection of scans of some of Newt Gingrich's napkin doodles. The man is clearly a dangerously unstable megalomaniac- remind me again why the American people are seriously considering him for president instead of heeding the advice of the time traveler instead?

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Originally Posted By: Erasmus The bottom line is alcohol in moderation is healthy, pot in moderation not so much (it just dulls the pain) and cigarettes in moderation not at all but they don't distort people's perception and don't set them out on a murderous rampage to find the next fix. I was with you up until this point. How is pot in moderation less healthy than alcohol in moderation? Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't the "in moderation" part imply that you aren't going overboard with either? I think the contrast between cigarettes (with potential physical health problems) and the other two (with potential mental health problems) makes sense. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that by definition, nothing can be bad for you if you take it "in moderation" because it's in, well, moderation. Of course, the question of what exactly "moderation" is is rather more contentious. A shot/glass/joint a day? A week? A month? That's a little bit harder to unravel that just "in moderation"...

Originally Posted By: Lilith actually the mayan calendar didn't predict anything at all, that was just a thing that some new-agers made up because they figured that since their calendar system ended on that date it meant the world had to end too. it would be exactly the same as if someone said that the world had to end on December 31st because that's the end of the year. Let's not forget that they tend to also invent elaborate psuedoscientific theories about the planets aligning or a magnetic pole change or galactic space radiation to confirm their obsession with a utterly irrelevant civilization that died out like five hundred years before the Spanish even got there. It's not like people who propose that "we die in 2012 because Mayans!" are making some kind of honest mistake at this point- they've long since passed into willful New-Age delusion and hardly deserve any more attention than Gene Ray or Harold Camping.

I've never understood why people wouldn't want to vote. Everyone pays taxes, everyone enjoys government services, and everyone seems to want to complain how X aspect of the government is terribly horribly bad. Why not just excercize your right to vote and fix that? Doubling voter turnout could have massive impact on the political makeup of the country, but people seem to be too lazy to spend a few minutes in line once every two years to be bothered to...

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit As for Iraq's resources, I see oil as a zero-sum game. If Iraq's oil is going to a third party then the third party is not competing with the US for other sources of oil. Oil (both that currently produced and the potential world supply) is finite. We need to have an energy policy in the US. The President spoke of going after all possible energy sources last night. That's not as focused as I would like to hear, but it's tough to argue with. The devil is in the details. I always hate when Iraq is framed in the lens of oil. If the "goal" of a nefarious Exxon-sponsored US shadow government invasion of Iraq was to get oil, then we have done a terrible job doing so- since we still haven't managed to get oil production back up to what it was in 2001 before we invaded. No, I think we were dealing with some old-fashioned Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld megalomania- and when you look at the total lack of planning that went into the whole thing, that becomes more and more apparent.

Originally Posted By: Master1 Just to make sure everyone knows, while Santorum and Romney were very close in Iowa, the actual delegate spread is 7-7-7 for Romney, Santorum, and Paul. People always seem to forget about him. Even Dantius ignored Paul in his list of GOP frontrunners, while including Herman Cain. Those were candidates who explicitly led in the polls at one point, and Paul can only manage a consistent third place on average (RCP average, to be precise, and Bachmann won that thingy. Straw poll). Besides, it's not like Ron Paul isn't also crazy, so don't feel too left out. He just apparently isn't the unique brand of Republican-establishment crazy required to be a frontrunner! I hear he even disagrees with (*gasp*) Saint Reagan on some things!

Originally Posted By: Landmark Indecision —Alorael, who thinks the greater benefit would be avoiding situations like the 2000 recounts in Florida. The popular vote is less likely to be so close. Tell that to the Iowans who voted for Santorum or Romney in the primaries. Margins of victory of less than 50 where >120,000 ballots were cast? That's a pretty close popular vote!

Originally Posted By: Actaeon Continuing my recent tradition of citing webcomics: http://xkcd.com/282/ ... We are no longer friends.

Originally Posted By: Sarachim Originally Posted By: Dantius Yes, that's my point. They wouldn't use it if they didn't have enough widespread support for detaining people, and if they had that, they wouldn't need the law to justify doing so- and since it's either totally useless or completely unnecessary, why would we care if it's on the books or not? The same logic can be applied to pretty much any legal check to the power of the government. Each time I call you a fascist, I'm a little less sure I'm joking. I'm pretty sure I've implicitly called myself a cryptofascist, so I'm not sure why you think that invoking that label will suddenly cause my to turn a political about-face and recant all my prior opinions. Also, since this is the Internet, where long-held ruls of rhetoric and argumentation no longer hold, I can also comment that I win via Godwin's Law, since injecting accusations of fascism into a discussion about constitutional functionalism v. originalism doesn't really do anything but poison the well.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Come now, Dantius. It isn't Chinese water torture, it's American waterboarding torture. I was actually proposing that, given the current anti-Chinese sentiment in the right wing (currency manipulators? really?), we could get them to change the primaries from scary foreign Chinese water torture style with one a week to a red-blooded AMERICAN waterboarding-style schedule, where you're deluged with dozens of primaries a week until you can't take it anymore.

The Constitution was written hundreds of years ago, was exceptionally limited in scope, gave broad liscence to allow its expansion, and has been amended many times since then. Vast parts of it are no longer applicable to the modern world- I would imagine that the Founders would have written thins very differently if they knew that a few dozen men were capable of destroying a city with nukes, or shutting down the entire economy with cyber warfare , or killing hundreds of thousands with bio weapons, or even just conventional killings on the scale of 9/11. Things change, and sometimes the changes is the Constitution lag behind- unless you're claiming that the original document as penned by the Founders was divinely inspired as the best and purest form of government known to man, in which case I'd merely like to inquire how many slaves you intend to purchase when the all the Amendments get rolled back.

Originally Posted By: Excalibur That's the problem: it's on the table for the government to use in the future. I see no reason for the government to reserve that kind of right. After all, the constitution does give Congress the power to suspend habeas corpus if need be. Yes, that's my point. They wouldn't use it if they didn't have enough widespread support for detaining people, and if they had that, they wouldn't need the law to justify doing so- and since it's either totally useless or completely unnecessary, why would we care if it's on the books or not?

Originally Posted By: The Turtle Moves ...and Gingrich wins South Carolina. Bahahahahaha. Why can't we just have primaries all at once? That way we don't force candidates to pander to super right-wing evangelicals in Iowa and S.C., and we don't wind up with elections "decided" after like 1/20th of the electorate votes in seven states? I mean, even just staggering it so we get like ten to fifteen a week for a month and then it's over would be so much better than the Chinese water torture that is the current system.