This guy is going places, maybe even the White House!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=209886
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=22709

My huge space thread seems to have brought them out from under their rocks, because all the abusive posts, no matter what thread, insult me for supporting a manned mission to Mars.

I should have known making a post in the wake of Armstrong's death about why we weren't colonizing the solar system would have brought out the Luddites and misanthropes and turned the thread into a 500-post epic flame-war filled with ignorance and allusions to "Avatar". Why do I always make such threads hoping for educated and reasonable discussions?

So, I was taking a shower this morning, I lost my balance on the wet bottom of the shower and leaned on the wall to regain my balance and a bunch of tiles and drywall caved in, and the drywall looked like it had turned into mud. Fortunately my building's resident manager told maintenance to get their asses over here ASAP.

In 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon everyone expected that we would keep going farther. But then in the mid 70s NASA got mauled by the small-minded deficit hawks who thought they did not need to keep up NASA's funding because we beat those Evil Commie Russians and that's all that mattered. It seems like all of a sudden nobody cared anymore, some even started bashing space exploration using the equally small-minded "we have more important things to do here on terra firma" argument.

I wonder if the Vietnam War and Watergate are to blame, destroying the belief in Big Government doing Big Things, making NASA a victim of the same rise of selfish Individualism that lead to the late 70s "tax revolts" in California and the election of Reagan in 1980. I suspect that also, among us on the Left that the strain of technophobic misanthropy found among many Green types who believe in the philosophy of Deep Ecology has something to do with it, thus the posts here on DU decrying space exploration as spreading the "cancer" of humanity.

According to astrophysicist Robert Zubrin a 3-year manned mission to Mars would cost $30 billion per mission and is perfectly feasible with today's technology. That is chump change compared to the "Defense" budget, and we would not have to pay all of that if it is set up as a multi-national mission. The problem is a lack of will. people either dogmatically assert that such a mission is either impossible, too expensive, or immoral, and all of those assertions are bullshit.

The timing that they starting going after him is suspicious, right after he threatened to publish some stuff that would make the Banksters look bad, yet at the same time I am being increasingly nauseated by the misogyny of many of Assange's defenders, and then again I am worried that the PTB are using our own progressiveness by making us afraid be being called misogynists for defending Assange.

I'm about ready to throw my hands in the air.

...we cannot detect serotonin levels directly.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021153857

Sounds like the same sophistry used by Creationists to say "but you never saw anything evolve".

Something that really irks me is that it seems like in the past 40 years or so the "personal perspective" has been put on a glowing pedestal to the detriment of objectivity. If someone is offended by the world "niggardly" then it is offensive, the objective fact that it has no relationship to the N-word is simply ignored. If you correct some woo-woo's factual errors you are condemned for "not respecting their own perspective". Tell someone that menstrual cycles have nothing to do with the Moon you are condemned for preferring objective fact over "what women just know". It seems like people are pressured to "respect people's perspectives", that is, don't ever "offend" anybody by telling them they are wrong, and thus "privileging one perspective over another".

This crap seems to go hand in hand with the rise of Postmodern Social Theory in Academia, in which there are no objective truths, just narrative "realities" unique to each person.

Something that really irks me is that it seems like in the past 40 years or so the "personal perspective" has been put on a glowing pedestal to the detriment of objectivity. If someone is offended by the world "niggardly" then it is offensive, the objective fact that it has no relationship to the N-word is simply ignored. If you correct some woo-woo's factual errors you are condemned for "not respecting their own perspective". Tell someone that menstrual cycles have nothing to do with the Moon you are condemned for preferring objective fact over "what women just know". It seems like people are pressured to "respect people's perspectives", that is, don't ever "offend" anybody by telling them they are wrong, and thus "privileging one perspective over another".

This crap seems to go hand in hand with the rise of Postmodern Social Theory in Academia, in which there are no objective truths, just narrative "realities" unique to each person.

I alerted on this post:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1115135

and the jury voted 2-4 to leave it:



Attitudes like that of the post I alerted on promoted continued stigmatizing the mentally ill, including mentally ill people who post on this site. Such crap is not acceptable on a progressive website. Those who voted to keep that bigoted post should be ashamed of themselves.