Odin2005

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Name: Taylor Selseth
Gender: Male
Hometown: Ulen, MN
Home country: US
Current location: Moorhead, MN
Member since: Fri Nov 11, 2005, 09:42 PM
Number of posts: 53,521

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Older Archives

Anyone reading "Why Marx Was Right" by Terry Eagleton?

I'm about halfway through and it's blowing me away. Eagleton is really witty, too!

He does a good job at debunking the usual criticisms of Marxism, that it is dehumanizing and deterministic, that it assumes that the material conditions of society are the only thing that matters, that it is a utopian pipe dream, etc. Eagleton goes very in depth about a society needing to be extremely productive, wealthy, and having the potential to be "post-scarcity" for necessities before a social revolution can be successful, otherwise it leads to Stalinism. He also refutes the notion that Marx's ideas are based on a notion of there being no essential human nature, because if there were no essential human nature, Eagleton argues, that people would not get angry over unjust social relations.

Posted by Odin2005 | Sun Apr 29, 2012, 12:28 AM (19 replies)

Oy, the paranoia over domestic drones is getting ridiculous.

Yep, that unmanned search-and-rescue plane is really a CIA drone out to spy on you! NOT!

Posted by Odin2005 | Mon Apr 23, 2012, 08:33 PM (10 replies)

A funny fact about the sun is that it is a very slow nuclear reactor.

It's power comes from it's mass, any particular square inch of the Sun's core does not produce enough energy to power a TV, but the sun is huge and all that energy adds up

And that slowness is a good thing, it's why it's been chugging along for 4.6 billion years and will keep chugging for another 5 billion.

To give some perspective, any one proton in the sun's core has only a 50% of being fused into a helium nucleus over the Sun's entire lifetime.

Red dwarfs are even slower, and the whole star is convective, so it has to go through ALL of it's hydrogen before it dies, that will take over a TRILLION years, Proxima Centauri will be burning hydrogen long after the Sun and Alpha Centauri have died.

The great mass of the big blue stars means that they burn very quickly and the most massive like the bright blue stars in the Orion Nebula, live for only a few million years despite weighing up to 130 times more than the Sun.

Posted by Odin2005 | Sun Apr 22, 2012, 10:02 PM (10 replies)

UGH! my Iraq vet cousin is turning into a Teabagger.

I posted this toon on Facebook:

and my cousin responded by saying:

One they are lucky we even rebuild for their ass.. Two we never took their oil.. Where is your proof we did?? Don't you think if we were taking the oil our gas prices would be lower?? I've been to Iraq I have seen the country trust me any damage we did wasn't that bad considering the country is crap anyway.. I hate when the news and just people try to make them people out to be the victim. They are ruthless they are dangerous they are cheap fighters they have taken the lives of many of our armed forces and injured many more.. I say we should take everything from them.. Take the oil they shouldn't even be considered part of the human race.. They are dirty disease ridden people.. Savages...

He's also become a birther. And he voted for Obama in 2008.

Posted by Odin2005 | Sun Apr 22, 2012, 01:10 PM (30 replies)

I'm trying to reduce how much meat I eat. One problem: meat cravings.

No matter how much I read about the horrible conditions inside feedlots and slaughterhouses it just won't break my craving for meat. Would trying those veggie-burgers and other faux-meat products work?

God, I wish they would hurry up with the meat grown in a lab thing...

Posted by Odin2005 | Tue Apr 17, 2012, 10:25 PM (39 replies)

Schizotypal personality and Religious nuttiness.

I have been musing for a while that a lot of people who are into "Charismatic" Christian denominations or New Age craziness have some degree of Schizotypy. They do not have the full-blown psychotism and break from reality of Schizophrenia, but still have bizarre perceptions of "paranormal" things and visions of a Jungian Archetypal nature. Among the Christian nuts one can also see this in their obsession with the Book of Revelation.

Posted by Odin2005 | Tue Apr 17, 2012, 08:27 PM (7 replies)

Schizotypal personality and Religious nuttiness.

Posted by Odin2005 | Tue Apr 17, 2012, 08:19 PM (1 replies)

Note to woo-woos, St. Johns Wort is just another SSRI!

I picked up a wonderful book from the thrift store I work at on herbal medicines written by a toxicologist who talks about the active compounds in the herbs and legitimate scientific studies involving the herbs and their side effects. No woo about the wisdom of nature and similar crap, just science.

I was floored when he says that the active compound in St. John's Wort functions just like any other SSRI, and it has the exact same side effects as Prozac.

Posted by Odin2005 | Mon Apr 16, 2012, 01:35 AM (14 replies)

4 people on this jury apparently does not get sarcasm.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1218&pid=20323

I was sarcastically making a point that if it were a Muslim complaining about that condo rule the RW bigots would be screaming bloody murder.

ALERTER'S COMMENTS:

Mooslim?

JURY RESULTS

A randomly-selected Jury of DU members completed their review of this alert at Fri Apr 13, 2012, 05:53 PM, and voted 4-2 to HIDE IT.

Juror #1 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #2 voted to HIDE IT and said: http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd233/whipp99/Crude and Funny/simpsons.jpg
Juror #3 voted to HIDE IT and said: This post is hurtful, rude, and over-the-top in its response to the OP. I am actually more disappointed with the insinuation that the OP is intolerant without any direct evidence of intolerance. Odin2005 can do better than this post.
Juror #4 voted to HIDE IT and said: No explanation given
Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: I think Odin2005 is not mocking Muslims as much as he is trying to mock judeo-christians who go to extreme lengths to protect their religious displays, but wouldn't think twice about squashing other religious displays.
Juror #6 voted to HIDE IT and said: Indeed. Moooslim? WTF? Begone with it.

Juror #5 got it exactly correct.

Posted by Odin2005 | Fri Apr 13, 2012, 08:00 PM (16 replies)

Somebody tell the radio-causes-cancer nuts some basic physics.

Good lord, radio wave photons are the least energetic photons there are, visible light is much more energetic, and yet these nuts seriously think that radio waves damage DNA???

Posted by Odin2005 | Fri Apr 13, 2012, 07:45 PM (9 replies)

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