lemur

I'm guessing it would depend on the condition of you muscles and how much energy they are willing and able to respond to the adrenaline with. I don't have a clue about all the mitigating factors though, so I couldn't really even begin to speculate about even the feeling that results from 1mg adrenaline, let alone how much muscle-activity/tension I would respond with.

I should have known that trying to use the language of sarcasm to critically respond to a comment written in sarcasm wouldn't work. Sarcasm is best suited for pushing one point of view in a way that makes it seem naturally true, because one's true meaning is not explicated. My point was that you were lumping together political interests that go against the status quo as if there was something generally wrong with that, so I was pointing out that there is something wrong with the politics of political conformity by avoiding risky political positions.

Herd conformists who avoid focus in politics are the most awesome. They are the true backbone of anti-democratic status-quo reinforcement. They are also the most savvy in voting for "change you can believe in" while in fact wanting nothing more than to maintain a persistent herd-culture.

Spirit refers to your inner experience. Another term for it is "subjectivity."

To me it seems like the anti-conservatives are the ones who make everything about religion, sanity, greed, class, and just about everything except true economic independence, which is what republicanism is supposed to be about. I don't see why anyone would even get into an argument about who is more racist, since that is a sure method to make politics about race generally. Why not raise politics above issues of social distribution of power and privilege? Could that be why there are all the accusations of "socialism?"

The same reason why people complained about GW Bush being unintelligent or rich; because people are petty and feel the need to make politics personal. It is wrong but you can neither expect to prevent it from happening, nor can you associate the actions of some individuals with their party or other political affiliation. Making it personal is just something some people in each movement choose to do, either because they're not mature enough to resist or because they're not intelligent enough to focus on the issues instead of bringing it to the ego level of the people involved.

I think you are using the word racism when what you are talking about is bigotry. Racism is a larger and more complex phenomenon than the personal prejudices of individuals. I'm not sure what it really matters in a political sense whether some tea-partiers are bigoted at the individual level. That is about as relevant as whether some democrats live in predominantly white middle-class neighborhoods. The fact is that racism continues to perpetuate class-stratification in the economy and this tea-party movement is polarized against a certain approach to maintaining the status-quo of the economy. Depending on what results the politics ultimately have, there may be economic changes or not that help deconstruct the class-stratification system of exploitation that fuels and is fueled by the racism that perpetuates it. That is the more relevant issue than who's a bigot and what political affiliation they are claiming at present.

If you really want to demonstrate faith that capitalism will replace the wealth taken in taxes, this is the way to go with government spending and taxation. First the government takes the liberty of spending how it wants to. Then it taxes the wealthy to show that it is confident that social class stability is stable enough that no one will ultimately suffer due to the taxation. This really cements the class relations of an economy because it basically shows that the working and middle classes are happy with the way the government spent money and the wealthy are happy to have benefited from the economy in which that money was spent. It's basically a way of saying, "good job, keep up the good work," to the government. After all, wealth is not so much about avoiding taxation as it is about maintaining the top of the feeding chain position in the economy. The wealthy thus make back what they are taxed as the rest go on spending as they are accustomed to. For everyone who is more interest in change, progress, or something other than reinforcing the status quo, this economic strategy of spending followed by taxation of the wealthy is crap.

Why then would gravity be less in orbit than on the surface of the planet then? I suppose because gravitons are circling the planet and pushing you away from the Earth just as others are pushing you toward it? Then what would cause you to orbit? Wouldn't gravitons be pushing you from all lateral directions equally as well?

First you say there is no such thing as force at a distance. Then you say all forces are push forces. Is this because all forces are due to quanta being emitted and received? If so, I don't get how gravity can be a push-force transmitted by particles without gravity dissipating as it passes through layers of blockage, such as the many stories of a sky scraper. If gravity was the result of particles pushing down from above, each successive level of a sky scraper from the top down would experience less gravitation due to some of the gravity getting used up by the matter above it. Since gravity doesn't decrease when entering the lobby of such a tall building, I have to conclude that gravity cannot be a push force coming down from above.

It was a response to a thread post. The question is what is the point of subjecting mythology to scientific verification? It's like arguing that bugs bunny isn't funny because rabbits can't really talk and eat carrots like they were cigars.

Which historical records are you referring to? The bible? What other historical records of that time are available? It's theology. The point of the story is the meaning conveyed, not the historical accuracy. For all you know someone made it up along with the story of Jesus and all the saints. It doesn't matter. The point is the meaning. The Lord of the Rings is completely fictional but the will to power represented by the struggle over the rings is real. Why do people bicker over historical accuracy of theological stories?

Suddenly I'm wondering if all the fiscal stimulus and bailout drama was ever intended to do more than garner popular support for fiscal conservatism. The question is whether reducing fiscal interests from democracy will actually result in popular civil discourse that is less driven by money-making interests. In all likelihood, the public will just start going haywire to search for new sources of money, as they always seem to. But, you never know, economics may actually start to occur in parallel with civil discourse instead of as its driving force.

This seems to have turned into a very similar to discussion as the one whether violence was more prevalent under Muslims or Christians, or among religious or seculars. Why not just make people who operationalize fear for politics their own category whether they identify with the left or the right? Let's face it, fear tactics are ultimately about creating sides and scaring as many people into taking your side as possible, regardless of whether they have rational reasons to do so. So whether it's the left or the right using fear, it doesn't matter for the people who react anyway because they are just taking sides out of fear anyway without necessarily having any reasonable conception of what they're supporting as a result.

Obama isn't responsible for the congress or the people. They are. They need to stop being reactive and start proposing pro-active visions of social-economy that go beyond selling tax-cuts and reductions in governance to actually charting visions that contain honest predictions of what the possible outcomes will be. If people want to dismantle health-care initiatives, they need to put their vision of what the results of that will be and take responsibility for those results. Instead, what they will do as always is to forecast only positive outcomes and use those to sell/push their policy-visions. Sometimes I question whether anyone is capable of real responsible democratic negotiations or if it will always break down into factionalism with competing interests trying to manipulate and dominate as much as possible to assert and secure their own interests without any larger vision. Obama has always had good visions and expressed them well; only all anyone else could hear in them was more money, more jobs, black president, cheap abundant fuel, etc. Without people being willing to work toward the visions Obama expressed, he was never more than a single voice. Now the people will go doing what they always do, wasting energy for their own gluttony and gain and blaming it on the president for failing to cure them of their bad habits. If Obama takes responsibility for those bad habits and spins them as not that bad he will maintain some popularity. If he stands up to them and tells them it's their fault and that things are as bad as they are, he will be hated as a cynic. Since he's a smooth politician, he will do the former but it's not fair to blame him for the stubborness of old habits that die hard when no one can even understand what real change would be, let alone believe in it.

It tells you they recycle and buy re-usable shopping bags. It's really quite a coincidence considering their green color, don't you think?

Don't underestimate the role played by social-identity management in whether people are willing to comprehend math or anything else. Many people don't avoid comprehending academic knowledge because they can't but because they are afraid of losing their "regular person" status. They may think that intelligence would make them "an intellectual" and if they have some social bias against intellectuals as a sociotype they will avoid learning anything they think will move them in that direction. Still, I don't think that's the point of the quote anyway. The point, imo, is that convoluted language is a mark of science that is unconvinced of its own solidness. Someone who really believes in the solidity of their science will explain it as simply as possible because they have no fear that it will sound simple and unintelligent when worded simply. Some science, on the other hand, is just glorified common sense translated into expensive-sounding language. This is common in social-science that is little more than political ideology disguised as proven knowledge. In that case, scientific complexity becomes more of a propaganda strategy than a methodological inevitability.

I find online information exchange more efficient than physical-presence. It also makes discussants immediately express themselves in text, which is somewhat writing practice, depending on what kind of writing they want/need to practice. Of course, some students may get something out of face-to-face contact with teachers and/or other students. Also, for students who tend to think of education as something superfluous in a world defined and dominated by economic structuring, online education may increase their sense of the world being dominated by corporatism and other business activities. Ultimately, I think there should be ways of integrating online education with students' everyday practical activities, such as their work. This would encourage students to take a view of knowledge as something that can/should be applied in their work and other everyday life situations.

This is cynical to assume as a rule, but not entirely unfounded. The essence of war is conflicting views regarding boundaries and governance. It can be carried out with as much ethical responsibility as its agents choose to employ in their war activities. Politics based on fear is anti-democratic. Democratic politics is supposed to be based on open dialogue and reason. The fact that various players make politics about winning and domination instead of representation and civil discourse is an abuse of democracy that is ironically made possible by the freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is of course necessary to prevent authoritarian censorship of anti-democratic forms of speech/propaganda, but this does not prevent it from being abused by authoritarian fear-mongers.

I think it is a pseudoscientific idea that there is something physiologically unique about early childhood (language) learning. Children learn language fairly slowly if you look at how slowly their vocabularies improve and how slowly their grammar and composition skills develop. Adults can actually develop language skills, like other skills, more quickly that children can. The reason, I think, adults feel more blockage with regard to language acquisition is that they have developed more strongly defined sense of self, which is expressed in language-expressions they have already mastered. So their fluency in languages they've already learned translates into fluency of self-expression, making them feel comfortable and secure in "who they are." If you would devote as much time and energy to learning and practicing a new language each week as you do to, say, media usage; you would be fluent within a few years if not sooner. The problem is that you would need to be able to practice interactively with others who are fluent in that language. It would also help if they were patient and willing to repeat things when you didn't understand and explain words and phrases when you had questions. Language-learning starts out slow because you have to develop a feel for actually deciphering words and remembering entire sentences in order to repeat and analyze them. Once you gain that basic familiarity/comfort with processing the audio-streams, however, you can start to respond to what you hear by repeating and re-arranging words and applying the grammar. Eventually you would start to gain a feel for how you sound with regards to your word and phrase choices because you would recognize the nuances of various phrases, expressions, and word connotations. That's something that children don't really get until adulthood anyway, so it's not like a 4 year old has an advantage on you with that level. It's just tough to get through all the mistakes and sounding-foolish to develop basic fluency that is hard because 1)it's stressful and 2) it requires a certain amount of distance from your established patterns of self-expression

Ultimately, everyone gets sick or dies from some disease and what disease isn't either directly caused or in some other way the result of genes? Would you want to prevent all births because the bodies will eventually get sick and die? What would make more sense might be to say it is more ethical for people with problematic genetic propensities to seek reproductive partners with non-similar propensities in order to maximize the chance that problems will not be expressed. The other side of this would be that it is more ethical for people with less genetic risks to reproduce with partners with more risk to "water down" the problem-propensities in their genes. That way, recessive genes become more likely to be erased without reducing the overall genetic diversity of the species by the loss of individual genetic material due to non-reproduction.

Well, I have also questioned all these moral assertions but I've analyzed them one by one and found that each impinges on individual freedom in its own way. Promoting abortion, for example, promotes liberal sexuality which promotes a prostitution-type approach to sexuality where people use each other sexually as part of economic subjugation. Likewise, drug use (including marijuana) facilitates a way of life where people live in shame and hiding and therefore deference to authority. Finally, the idea that no country should "meddle" with another country is what I would call separatist nationalism which is the same ethic of state-sovereignty that divided people during the time of the civil war, when some people thought slavery should be decided by popular sovereignty at the state level, while Lincoln and the republicans felt that it was not right to allow slavery to expand regardless of how popular it was in a give state. Poverty was my big issue for siding with the left, because I always believed the ideology that the right promoted the gap between rich and poor and the left wanted to remedy it through redistribution. At some point I realized, however, that redistributing money to the poor never helps because the net effect of the poor spending redistributed money is that the corporations get richer from the increase in GDP. So, imo, the best way to decrease the gap between rich and poor is for the rich to save their money instead of spending it. That is the economic culture that Keynes criticized, but it is really a worthwhile social contract if the rich were disciplined enough to stick with it. Basically, there is no redistribution but the rich live a meager life and consume as little as they can in order to preserve the wealth for future generations. Then, the poor accept the rich because they live meekly and consume very little. This would be the best way to address the gap between rich and poor imo. Pretending to fix it through redistribution just increases the gap by increasing corporate profits and driving up inflation and the dependency of the poor on money, which makes them that much more needy to find a source of income, whether it be government-redistribution, crime, or employment.

A = A is a statement of identity. A in itself is an interactive function, therefore it becomes irrelevant what "A =" in itself because the issue is how A interacts with other variables.

Maybe, but the new deal progress of incorporating and creating jobs was highly against the republican ethic of private ownership and self-government. At this point I question how different the corporate job-creation ethic of the democratic party today is from the slave-plantation ethic of the 19th century. I think the republican party is progressive in wanting to move away from centralized governance, whether political or economic.

my point is that the racism in this kind of fear-tactic, regardless of what party you identify with, is reminiscent of the kind of fear-tactics used in the wake of slave-liberation to drum up fear and support for racism, which has now become nationalism.