CFI Forums

Take a drive on the wild side… Mars Curiosity Rover

2013-05-25T06:59:20-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FH6QPAD-BU

Ayn Rand describes herself and other thoughts regarding Rand

2013-04-05T18:08:50-05:00

I don’t know why that image isn’t working anymore.
Well, here’s her quote:

“I am a mediocre writer, hypocrite and a sociopath.

My disciples are ignorant deluded hypocritical sociopaths too.”

Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosembaum

AKA Ayn Rand

I bring it up because it’s about the first time I’ve read anything she’s written that has made sense to me.

EVERY SPERM IS SACRED - in defense of “personhood”

2013-05-13T12:42:56-05:00

The resolution:
http://www.wilmingtonde.gov/docs/1029/3641.pdf

“[E]ach ‘egg person’ and each ‘sperm person’ should be deemed equal in the eyes of the government and be subject to the same laws and regulations as any other dependent minor and be protected against abuse, neglect or abandonment by the parent or guardian,”

“[L]aws should be enacted by all legislative bodies in the United States to promote equal representation, and should potentially include laws in defense of ‘personhood,’ forbidding every man from destroying his semen.”

Yea babe, what’s good for the gander is good for the goose!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/02/wilmington-city-council-sperm-egg-personhood_n_1316924.html

Want do you want? New blog ideas

2013-02-18T11:16:29-05:00

Good afternoon all,

I am new to CFI but I have been doing a lot of research. Since I am currently not working (disabilities from military) I was thinking of starting my own blog where Rational people can discuss/argue about anything. But I was hoping you all could help me get started with some subject you would 1. Want to know more about or 2. want to argue about (respectfully of course). Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated.

-JB

The earth was once flat !!

2012-07-18T09:30:35-05:00

Greetings and warmest regards,

The voice in our head, you’ll hear it speaking and often singing a popular tune. Generally regarded to be part of your mind and often called the alter ego. Often it is incessant and bothersome when there are problems and troubles in your life. It is a voice you can’t switch off even if you try. You may try to stop it by thinking about something else but your thoughts are dragged back to the problem or trouble. It offers to resolve the conflict within your mind with no more information than can be drawn from your own knowledge and life experiences. People go about their lives never questioning and in complete acceptance of it being part of who they are.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that has no cure. People with schizophrenia hear a voice or multiple voices, both on the inside or outside of their heads. These multiple voices are called hallucinations. Schizophrenia is often triggered by the use of psychedelic and hallucogenic drugs. The argument that all the people who use these drugs do not turn schizophrenic is valid to the point where and when, the schizophrenic has become aware that the voice in their head is not their own.

The person that has become aware of the voice in their head that is not their own, is either forced to comply with the general thinking of the masses that consider this voice to be part of who they are, their alter ego, or face the consequence of being labeled mentally ill and/or mentally unstable. I say forced to comply, because, it is a deliberate attempt to quell the awareness that the voice is not part of you and not your own.

If this awareness is persistent and the person does not comply with acceptance, this “illness” will now manifest in multiple voices and hallucinations, creating doubts about your sanity, both to yourself and for others. This happens for one reason and one reason alone, this “illness” does not want to be found out, wants to stay hidden, and wants everyone to believe it does not exist.

The more than frightening experience from the awareness of having someone beside yourself in your head, privy to all your thoughts and dark guilty secrets, thoughts and personal secrets that are constantly dragged back in your mind’s eye or vision along with the auditory hallucinations of multiple voices, to say the least is maddening. There is a war raging in your mind to try and control it, you fight to put away these dark thoughts and reminiscenes, and to stop the voices from speaking. Voluminous feelings of paranoia, guilt, fear and anger also seize you. People thus affected will now opt for either medical schizophrenic treatment or a demonic exorcism.
In cases of exorcisms and demonic possession, the church first determines if the person is mentally ill, before proceeding with the exorcism. It is my belief, that the amount of self control you can exert on yourself, while this war rages on in your head, that will stop you from acting and behaving in a manner of a demonically possessed individual. People however; possess varying degrees of self control which is why you see different degrees of acting out (LOL). On a more serious note, the loss/inability of self control both in vocal and motor function allows the “illness” to manifest itself in you with strange voices and stranger behaviour.

Demonic Exorcisms like medical Schizophrenic treatment offer no permanent cure to the “illness”. Exorcisms are administered multiple times, the ordeal being so scary and traumatic to the individual suffering the ‘illness” that they are now willing to drop the awareness of there being someone else in their head, and/or like medical schizophrenic treatment, learn to live peaceably with it.

It is at this stage i.e. ” drop the awareness of there being someone else in your head and learn to live peaceably with it ” that the war in your mind ceases, there are no more traumatic flashes of guilt in your mind, and although the individual continues to hear a voice or voices, there are no accompanied feelings of paranoia, guilt, fear and anger.

My inference therefore is:

This “illness” is an omnipresent being in us all, a singularity that lives on this planet, a being whose greatest trick has been to deceive us all into believing it does not exist.
Schizophrenia and demonic possession, are but the tools used by this being, this alter ego that exists in us all, to mask and hide itself. If discovered it will cause not only you but others to question your sanity and scare you into the submission of non awareness.
In the sane and normal person it offers no more information than can be drawn from your own knowledge and life experiences because to to do otherwise would raise suspicion of someone other than yourself existing in your own head.

To all skeptics I say “prove to me that it is not” and to remind you, humanity once thought the earth was flat.

I remember this coffee shop…

2013-05-19T12:24:43-05:00

I remember this coffee shop in my hometown. It was a real cool place to go and commiserate with eclectic people who were generally like-minded.
The owner was very kind and had a great vision for her business.
Unfortunately the coffee shop was within walking distance of a large housing project.(the federally subsidized kind-people with disabilities etc…)
A number of the residents of this housing project would come into the coffee shop and take advantage of a cheap cup of coffee and sit for hours.
They were sometimes “disheveled”, sometimes disruptive to the other guests, etc etc etc…A few had obvious addiction problems and many were lacking in personal hygiene to say the least.
Mostly the guests would smile nervously. The owner felt in part sympathetic and partly helpless.
Eventually her only customers left were the “disheveled” residents of the housing project.
She only stayed in business for 2 years. Her business failed.

Conspiracy Theories

2012-12-06T11:14:32-05:00

The notion of conspiracy theories (CT) itself is pretty interesting. People will go to great lengths to prove or disprove CT. Others will go to great lengths to get ideas about a set of events labeled as CT.

A good example of a CT would be the following: Let’s say it’s 40 years ago. A couple nutjob reporters are writing that numerous boys have been sexually molested by Catholic Priests, and that the upper echelons in the Church, like Bishops, have been actively covering it up. And that this has been happening throughout the US and indeed much of the world. Remember this is 40 years ago.

You can imagine what you’d hear: the reporters must be atheists and hate the church, must be scumbags to impune or even suggest moral failings of Priests, servants of God. And to suggest all these boys, priests, bishops, cardinals, etc. throughout America, or the world, are keeping quiet! Utterly ridiculous and anyone who buys into this crap has to be deranged.

And yet the reporters, as we now know, would have been completely correct.

Of course we could also come up with something that turned out to be false. The point is, just because something is labeled as CT doesn’t mean it’s true OR false. I do think the character and history of the people or institutions involved do matter though. In the case of Catholic Priests, I think they really did have a very positive image prior to all the revelations, so it was particularly hard to believe the truth. In the case of 911, in my opinion at least, the reputation of the US government prior to the event (Dem and Repub alike) lead me to seriously consider that it was an inside job. Buts that just my opinion.

My point is, CTs in themselves make up an interesting topic for discussion WITHOUT getting into particulars.

Unfair legal system?

2013-05-08T13:54:16-05:00

In the Death Penalty thread someone mentioned that African Americans make up the majority of those accused/jailed for crime in the US. And they stated this is a reason why the system is flawed and the death penalty should be illegal (as well as for other reasons that I don’t think matter to this thread). Many use this argument too against the criminal system in general. Ok I grant that. BUT now let’s discuss White-Collar Crime. Government statistics show that by a vast majority, white collar criminals (wcc) are white males. Does this mean the system is biased against white males too, as far as wcc is concerned?

(And please, don’t anybody be a jerk and accuse a poster of being racist. I think it’s a given that this forum has about the closest to 0 racists as you can come. This is a thread about truth and fairness, not race.)

If Hitler said…

2013-05-10T11:57:24-05:00

If Hitler said kittens are cute, does that mean they’re not?

That’s a question I pose sometimes to a person who has a knee-jerk response to an emotionally loaded question. It gets to the heart of many discussions, for example racism. In the Hitler example it’d be normal to say anything Hitler said, because he was such a vile and evil person (which is absolutely true IMO), must be wrong. It feels correct to say that. So the kitten question kind of brings out the fact that, well the truth is the truth no matter who says it.

So take a similar approach to something that was just in the news: A member of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation co-wrote a report about the cost of immigration reform. This Harvard PhD in 2009 included in his thesis on the subject the statement (words to the effect): “Blacks and Mexicans have lower IQs than Whites” and therefore… etc. You can imagine his point. (Again, I can’t stress enough, especially to VRZAM or whatever his name is who apparently finds it hard to debate, I personally don’t give a shizzit about a person’s IQ. Means absolutely nothing to me as far as their value as a person goes.)

So our instinct, assuming most of us are liberals here, would be to say this guy is a racist and a liar (and a conservative to boot) AND has got to be wrong. But is he a racist for saying that? What if the data did show that? Would we be willing to accept the data? NOW…this of course doesn’t in any way mean that if we agreed with him, that we should agree with whatever his conclusions are. That’s the hard part. An analogy would be in the discussion of women in military. I think it’s a pretty established fact that women tend to be less strong physically than men. Does that mean they shouldn’t serve in the military? Absolutely not. In fact we could probably argue that’s all the more reason to let them serve…assist in whatever way we can to help them gain physical stength, etc. (Again not my personal opinion here. I actually think if a woman wants to serve, regardless of her strength or whatever, it’s her choice to make, not mine.)

Point is, and this really is relavent to so many discussions in CFI: Are we really, REALLY, willing to go where the facts lead us? Or are we just as likely to be arguing points simply based on the fact that we don’t like them or don’t want them to be true? It’s a tough thing regardless of which side of a debate you’re on.

Who really kicked in the door?

2013-05-12T07:15:52-05:00

In the rescue of Amanda Berry and her daughter, was it Charles Ramsey (the somewhat stereotypical but entertaining black man) or was it Angel Cordero (the, apparently, undocumented immigrant)?

Many would likely say that it doesn’t matter. But I think that the answer could suggest some revealing things about how our mass media provides us with information that is accepted as truth while not necessarily being factual. It could also say something about how we, the audience, accept information as being true based more on emotional influences rather than facts.