Skip to Main Content (access key 1)
Skip to Search (access key 2)
Skip to Search GO (access key 3)
Skip to comments (access key 4)
Skip to navigation (access key 5)
Skip to top of page (access key 6)

Comments by magetoo


1. Root and Branch

Comment #73270 by magetoo on September 24, 2007 at 4:06 pm

Interesting read, if a little rambling. Well, more than a little.

About halfway through, it struck me that it might be something useful for the fence-sitters, or the religious moderates (for lack of a good term). They may not want to read Dawkins, but here is someone who is comfortable speaking in metaphor ("the tree of life"), who does include the obligatory stabs at The (abrasive, self-indulgent, arrogant) New Atheists, and who understands science and evolution.

Just a thought. Also, frist?

edit: Just to clarify, I mean Hacking, and none of the people reviewed.

2. 'Root of All Evil? The Original Program' available now on DVD

Comment #72362 by magetoo on September 20, 2007 at 8:24 pm

View the trailer: Small | Large | YouTube

Thank you Josh, this is the right way to do it. (linking videos, that is)

3. Faith schools should not be tax-funded, and here's why

Comment #72353 by magetoo on September 20, 2007 at 7:53 pm

The figures on this are almost too outrageous to set down on paper. Where abortion is legal, the maternal mortality rate is 0.2 per 100,000. In countries where it is illegal, the rate is 330 per 100,000.
For the journalists; you know how you like to print that [something] increases the risk of cancer by X%?

Here's an opportunity for an epic first page: "Policies (supported by your money, of course) increases mortality rates by 165 000%".

That should sell a few copies.

(Yes, I know of course that it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. But I'm making an argument for making the first page here.)

4. Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity

Comment #72332 by magetoo on September 20, 2007 at 6:50 pm

By speaking out, he is educating other soldiers who know him that it is possible to live a full life without an imaginary God. He is bringing attention that it is inappropriate for Christians in the military to impose their views of others.
Unfortunately, he is also educating them on the fact that he's not part of the team, and that he puts his own personal views above loyalty to the group. (Well, arguably anyway.)

What I'm saying is that MuNky82 is right in saying that the soldier should have avoided the issue altogether, if he knew it was going to cause a problem.

IMO, there really are situations where speaking out on what you believe is not appropriate. And nobody is arguing that the actions of the Major were correct, or that this should not be in court.

edit: hopefully clarified the argument.

5. Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity

Comment #72330 by magetoo on September 20, 2007 at 6:44 pm

Magratgarlick,
I really believe you should read the posts you are responding to, before doing so.

6. In Depth: Christopher Hitchens

Comment #71409 by magetoo on September 18, 2007 at 5:41 pm

Well, yes and no. Someone has been kind enough to supply us with a direct rtsp:// link. Whether you play or save that link is up to you.

I strongly doubt that RealPlayer will let you save, though. And depending on what an "erratic" connection is (will it disconnect, or is it just slow?), you may or may not be able to save the stream anyway.

But if you're willing to give it a try, "mplayer", which I use, can save streams. You might have to use the command line (the -dumpstream option), and/or experiment a bit.

7. Open letter to YouTube video

Comment #70442 by magetoo on September 15, 2007 at 1:43 pm

There are 19 links up there, but nobody bothered to include one to the actual video. Shame on you.

But here it is:

http://one.revver.com/watch/396716

8. Griffin's 'offensive' Emmy speech to be censored

Comment #69599 by magetoo on September 11, 2007 at 8:34 pm

You're on the A(theist) list now Kathy, bravo.

Somebody send her a scarlet A T-shirt, and a note saying just that.

9. There is no God and Dawkins is his Prophet

Comment #66458 by magetoo on August 30, 2007 at 3:26 am

Untranslated Swedish version here, for those who might prefer that.

10. Shop targets U.S. hunters with camo Bibles

Comment #65550 by magetoo on August 24, 2007 at 6:08 pm

The sacred word of the Creator - now available as a lifestyle gimmick.

I guess it's ironic.

11. Ancient Protein Tells a Story of Changing Functions

Comment #65368 by magetoo on August 23, 2007 at 11:49 pm

tieInterceptor:

btw, can anyone point me to an article here we had a few weeks back about evolution tests done in fish, they where on natural water spring , and the scientist separated some fish into springs with no predators, and others with...

I think that was not an article, but something in the Galapagos cruise lectures.

Ah yes, here: Lecture on Neo-Darwinism.

I know it's the one, because you said this in the comments:
I found the anecdote about the fish on the pond experiment explained to a random guy on a plane, and he gets all exited about it just to learn that is part of evolution theory...

I'll make this a PM as well.

12. The Politics of God

Comment #64363 by magetoo on August 19, 2007 at 7:06 pm

Great article. I'll be keeping an eye open for the book.

13. Authors at Google: Christopher Hitchens

Comment #64092 by magetoo on August 17, 2007 at 4:32 pm

Josh: "Adding comments has been disabled for this video." implies that "Why not share your comment on the article there as well? CLICK HERE" isn't entirely correct.

And perhaps the James Randi video from A@G might be worth posting if it haven't been already?

And as always, feel free to fix the link mangling that the comment-posting script thingy always does. (Editing works fine, but it's a pain having to go back and do that for every link.)


bockman: You could try the tools over at 1024k.de; it's what I use to download and watch YouTube videos. I could take a look at converting, but I'm not sure it would work.

14. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62919 by magetoo on August 12, 2007 at 10:06 am

I concur. Good thing we are all in agreement here.

(The walk will have to wait until the weather improves.)

15. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62914 by magetoo on August 12, 2007 at 9:52 am

Woolectomy? Thanks, but I think I'll go with taking a walk and spending less time arguing with pseudonymous strangers on the Internet. Your cloaked insult just clinched it.

16. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62905 by magetoo on August 12, 2007 at 9:04 am

Dr Benway wrote

Perhaps I missed the memo. Are human beings not supposed to feel annoyed now?

Feel annoyed all you want. But pouring scorn on people who criticize you in public, and then getting upset by being called "militant" is stupid. (Yes, I know you didn't do that in this comment thread.)
This "you guys" is strange. Responses here are from independent parties. If you want to argue against something posted, quote the bit of interest and respond to it specifically.
Yes, I probably should. I just wanted to get a comment on the general tone in there.

17. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62902 by magetoo on August 12, 2007 at 8:44 am

Northern Bright:
I think I agree with most of what you said. But where did this come from?

How often do we see comments from people (who doubtless think they're being original) along the lines of "Have you noticed that these atheists have an almost religious fervour about them?"?
Sure, that gets tossed about a lot. It does not have anything to do with the article posted above, though. It mentions similarities. The conclusion -- "therefore they are exactly the same" -- is something that this comment thread brought up.
The use of words like "fundamentalist", "followers", "faith", "creed" etc in describing atheists is deliberately loaded, and I see no reason to think that Gordon Lynch was using the words "TV evangelist" in any other way.
I do. Remember the title "Root of all evil?". It's all a part of selling your opinion, of making people read it in the first place.

Stop being so damned paranoid, guys. Not every comparison, and not all criticism, is an attack on "the movement".

18. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62896 by magetoo on August 12, 2007 at 8:22 am

denoir wrote:


The numbers of people identifying themselves as atheists in surveys have been a small fraction of the population
Not in Europe. Although there is great variation (Sweden 80%, Poland 10%), the pan-European average is 50%.
I am not sure I believe you on that 80% figure. The article on atheism in the Swedish Wikipedia links to a couple of surveys, one of which mentions a figure of 80%. Other figures mentioned are 28%, 31% - and even 85%. I tried looking for official statistics, but scb.se wasn't too forthcoming.

I personally only know of two people who actually identify as atheist, apart from myself. If you ask some random person, chances are you will get the standard noncomittal answer of "I don't believe in God, but I believe there is something...". Hardly a striking endorsement of disbelief in the supernatural.

19. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62885 by magetoo on August 12, 2007 at 7:51 am

It almost seems that I have read a different article from the one that people seem to be commenting on.

My reading is simply that "The New Atheim Movement is picking up some of the methods and media smarts that have been used successfully by the evangelicals."; with a lead-in of "Richard Dawkins' new series" and a lead-out of "this may lead to conflict".

But the comments seem to imply that he is attacking atheists, and Dawkins, for being (just as bad as) a loony cult. Where does this come from? The misunderstanding in the last two paragraphs?

But then again, judging by some of the comments perhaps it's not so far from the truth. For all the talk about how everything should be open to criticism, you guys (who are posting comments on this site) sure get annoyed when someone does not agree completely with your worldview.

20. Susan Blackmore interviews Dan Dennett

Comment #58154 by magetoo on July 23, 2007 at 5:53 pm

Thor


Whoever at the Guardian was responsible for the sound and/or recording equipment for this interview is an incompoetent twit [...]

Well...

The interview forms part of Susan's book, "Conversations on Consciousness"

Let me translate. Ahem.
"Susan recorded this herself on a portable voice recorder, while interviewing Dennett for her book."

Clear now?

I agree that the sound quality is horrible, though. The files at the two download links are byte-for-byte identical, by the way.

21. PZ Myers on Blogging Heads

Comment #57901 by magetoo on July 22, 2007 at 5:11 am

I actually tried wading through the Javascript to dig out a video link before I saw it was linked directly on the page.

So for anyone else who wants it, video is here (154 MB) and audio-only version is here (32 MB).

(And again, if Josh or someone would feel like fixing the way HTML links are handled, that would be just fine with me.)

22. Interview with Dan Dennett on Danish TV

Comment #54388 by magetoo on July 6, 2007 at 6:36 pm

The videos are actually hosted on YouTube. Here are links without the hideous Google Video top frame:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

(As a side effect, this makes the download-to-watch script I'm using work, so it might be useful for others as well.)

And it would be nice if posting links worked as expected too, without having to go back and edit the post every single time.

23. Christopher Hitchens on The Hour

Comment #50088 by magetoo on June 15, 2007 at 1:50 am

And here's a direct link:
http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/30569/thehour/videos/20070611_chrishitchens.wmv (ASX file, despite the extension)

Us Unix users can use 'mplayer' to watch. Might have to 'cat' the above ASX file to get a playable URL, or maybe not.

24. The planet hunters

Comment #47507 by magetoo on June 4, 2007 at 7:07 pm

#47499 by MelM
I'm not sure we are even on the same site. If there is some official statement that the topic at all times must be religion, I have sure missed it.

What I want, is just for the comments to be relevant to the article posted. Is that really too much to ask? Religion bashing is fine with me, but there is no need to drag it into every discussion regardless of topic.

And it reflects poorly on Dawkins and the rest of the community. It should not come as a surprise that we get a lot of "those militant atheists" articles when the first stop of any research on RD looks like this.

25. The planet hunters

Comment #47363 by magetoo on June 4, 2007 at 8:45 am

#47279 by Bizarro Dawkins:

And you know, why does everyone on this forum have to take a neutral article such as this one and hurl these contextually irrelevant digs at religion?

Imagine my surprise over actually agreeing with Bizarro. It's getting really old and predictable by now, and it makes the site look stupid.

26. If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

Comment #46613 by magetoo on May 31, 2007 at 8:06 pm

Sorry about the blatant plug, but Peter Watts deals with the topic of morality being hardwired a fair bit in his Rifters series of books (that I just finished). With proper references listed at the end of the books, too; which might make a decent starting point for further reading.

And they are all available online at his website under a Creative Commons license, for those of you who like hard SF and feel your will to live becoming too strong.

27. The Human Body as an Evolutionary Patchwork

Comment #32637 by magetoo on April 17, 2007 at 7:48 pm

jamesstephenbrown:

Did it occur to anyone else that if, as Professor Walker says, having visible whites made the target of our attacks more aware of our intentions; that this would be an evolutionary disadvantage?
What occurred to me was that it would be an example of selfish genes. They don't care about your ability to kill your competitor, they "care" about having more copies of themselves running around.

Although I think the cooperation theory works much, much better.

Excellent lecture by the way. Too bad the camera was fixed on the slides all the time - but I suppose it's hard to mess up completely that way.

And I'd just like to mention that MPlayer, which is available for Unix as well as Windows systems can save all sorts of streams as well. (It's what I use when I have to do that.)

28. Creation Science 101

Comment #30010 by magetoo on April 6, 2007 at 6:16 am

Most of his videos has something in the range of 20,000 - 40,000 views. "Creation Science 101" has over half a million. That probably says something about ... something.

This article is reposted from a website that accepts comments.
Why not share your comment on the article there as well?
Perhaps this line should not be included for Youtube videos, given the level of discourse typically seen there...

29. How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam

Comment #24767 by magetoo on March 8, 2007 at 12:03 pm

The article seems to leave a HTML tag open. Let's see if I can close it: is it italics or emphasis ?

(edit: it was emphasis.)

30. Out of Africa, in the Gut

Comment #22166 by magetoo on February 13, 2007 at 5:50 am

Wow. Just wow.

31. God and gorillas

Comment #20288 by magetoo on February 1, 2007 at 2:43 pm

Interesting article.

King needs to come out of the closet though.

32. Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Comment #19997 by magetoo on January 31, 2007 at 3:19 am

Ah, nice. I'm in the process of catching up on my Daily Show, so this is something to look forward to. 30th of January, it seems.

33. Are politics in your DNA?

Comment #19502 by magetoo on January 27, 2007 at 5:02 pm

#19497: Thank you, Russell.

And I'd also like to point out that debates like that one are best conducted in the forum, instead of swamping the article comments with posts.

34. Guest Host Bill Moyers with philosopher Daniel Dennett

Comment #18670 by magetoo on January 22, 2007 at 9:42 am

This is not a free (of charge) clip, is it?

Google Video doesn't really work 100% for me, but I can usually get around it by downloading, and then watching. That won't work here.

Too bad, it seems like it would be interesting.

35. Unscientific American: US Almost Last in Understanding Evolution

Comment #18604 by magetoo on January 22, 2007 at 2:37 am

This is even a national security problem, since a nation that won't face and study reality can't defend itself.

I'm not sure whether it is hilarious or just plain scary that the good old "national security" has to be dragged out in defense of reality.

Call me naive, but I think plain curiosity and a desire to figure out how things really work should be enough.

36. Atheist Outreach: Group Coaxes Unbelievers Into the Open

Comment #17816 by magetoo on January 16, 2007 at 6:06 pm

MIND_REBEL: "Face to face missionary work"? If I can spread atheism that way, where do I sign up? (I must go wash my mind now...)

I find it amazing that they have "more than 100 members" and "more than 1000 names" on the mailing list. In NYC! Either this is a hideously boring organization, or things are worse that I thought. But then on the other hand, perhaps there simply isn't much need for organized atheism.

37. Federal Way schools restrict Gore film

Comment #17475 by magetoo on January 14, 2007 at 1:59 am

Wow.

I just have to comment on Dave Larson's autoreply. It seems to be just a mishmash of whatever feeble excuses could be thought up the quickest. One, good, reason should be enough. Instead we see the shotgun approach - let's hope something hits the target. A few things stood out in particular:


10. Using a partisan to present issues affecting contested public policy matters makes it controversial per se. The media attention to our decision is also evidence of the controversial nature of this film.

Using a partisan? Al Gore is a climate scientist now? Amazing.

And the media attention is not necessarily an indication that the issue is controversial; rather, I think the most of us would agree that the media attention is due to what is percieved as a ban, and that it involves a political celebrity.


11. Science and politics have been merged on this issue by persons beyond our control. The political aspect of this is what makes it the most controversial, especially when a political partisan makes the presentation.

"The political aspect of this is what makes it the most controversial"? So the controversy is about politics, and not science?


12. On the issue of how final the debate is, Galileo and other out of the box thinkers come to mind. Would they have ever made their discoveries had they not questioned what was perceived to be the determined "facts" of the day by those in power? Those who believe science is infallible need a history lesson. Research issues that were thought to be scientific fact 50 or 100 years ago and you will truly understand why we believe in debate, even about science and even when some think the debate is over.

Here he's equating Galileo and "other out of the box thinkers", presumably climate change sceptics. Is he seriously suggesting that all opposing views must be taken seriously? That's ridiculous. Someone mentioned Holocaust deniers earlier, that might make for an interesting test case...

Sorry for any spelling errors, I can't seem to use the "preview" function. And I'm not saying the Al Gore's position is 100% proven true (though I personally think it's mostly true), just that some very poor arguments were used in defense of the decision.

38. Julia Sweeney on The Late Show with Craig Ferguson

Comment #12792 by magetoo on December 13, 2006 at 10:38 pm

Yorker: Well, he's a comedian, like apparently most talk show hosts. I suppose that would explain the "excessive jocularity".

And in case you missed it, the show is comedy too. :-)

39. The Big Question: Why are we here?

Comment #8972 by magetoo on November 23, 2006 at 3:40 am

David M:
Quicktime is broken here too, using wget on Unix. Unless there is a problem playing partially downloaded files; but then it does work with DivX/Xvid, so...

And the file is sent as text/plain. Other videos have worked, though.

Torrent please. :-)