Fasteriskhead

God, I'm going to have to get a little longwinded for this. Apologies in advance. Now, how the question of destiny goes is obviously going to depend first and foremost on what we mean by the word "destiny." Metal Dragon defines destiny as "The inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person or thing is destined." This is how the idea of destiny is most often conceived in everyday discussion. I would formulate it by saying: destiny conceives one or more events in time (time here conceived as a kind of [i]space[/i], constantly moving in one direction and infinitely divisible into any number of single "moments"), and specifically events situated in the future, which are already objectively determined and cannot not take place. These events are, in other words, future moments, future [i]presents[/i], which will necessarily happen. (No, I'm not just trying to sound pretentious here, I'm trying to put out the problem in the clearest way possible) Formulated like this, as the reality or nonreality of objectively extant future presents, the question of destiny is pretty obviously impossible to answer (as The13thMan said further up). Normally understood, the future is [i]precisely[/i] that region of time which we have no sure way of seeing or confirming; we can certainly make increasingly accurate [i]predictions[/i] by way of examining experiences we've already had and, through induction, making general laws out of them, but that's about it. Temporal events, roughly speaking, are arbitrary. There's simply no way of knowing for sure (no, not even through prophecy &c.) whether a given present that comes about necessarily [i]had[/i] to happen or just turned up by chance. So the question of destiny, phrased this way, basically only ever allows us to say whether we "feel" like there is or isn't destiny, presumably just because we do or don't like the idea. To paraphrase Heraclitus, it's probably useless to take random guesses about this kind of thing. But! Even if we say that we'll never know whether the world is on rails or not, that still doesn't mean we've gotten rid of destiny. It could just be that we've misunderstood what it means, and thus asked the question wrong. So, let's see if we can start over. The word originally comes from the Latin [i]de-[/i] ("completely") + [i]-stinare[/i] (something like "to stand"). Destiny can then mean refer to something "completely fixed," or in other words the objectively extant future present we mentioned above. But I think it might also mean something else. It can mean, not that the [i]event[/i] is set (objectively, necessarily), but that [i]we ourselves[/i] stand [i]towards[/i] something in a set way. For example: think of how we use the similar word "destination." The status of our destination when we set sail (or whatever) has nothing to do with its being inevitable, but rather [i]is[/i] our destination precisely because that's what we're oriented towards. Think of the number of times we've heard in bad TV shows, "It's my destiny to go to Harvard," "I'm destined to marry that girl," and so on. None of this has anything to do with inevitability and all that crap. Rather, destiny becomes the question of we, as human beings, being [i]oriented towards a destination[/i]. Don't get me wrong, this is not to fall into some feel-good cliche like "you choose your own fate" (ask someone really dedicated why they do what they do, and 9 out of 10 times they won't have a good answer). Destiny means that we ourselves are destined, that we stand towards a future that (so to speak) turns us towards itself, calls for us, and challenges us. However, this is a completely different definition of future than simply "events that haven't happened yet." So the problem is that in order to understand destiny (well, [i]this[/i] kind of destiny), we have to begin to question the traditional idea of time as a sequence of "nows" that have and haven't gone by. Or, to put this even more broadly: to get some grasp on destiny, we first have to ask, "How does time work?" (you know, the worrying thing is that I tried to put all that in as clear a way as I could and it's STILL incredibly difficult to read)

[quote name='Dagger']Her "Onii-sama!" has always been my favorite part of that (and yet why does it make me feel so dirty?).[/quote]Yeah, I think that entire show was meant to make us feel completely guilty about ourselves. Well, when we weren't more disappointed with the poor production values. Ah, what the heck, I'll drop a couple of others. '80s-themed this time!! Anyone not retro as all get out can probably skip this. -Dirty Pair ([URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVGlh1OrE-4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVGlh1OrE-4[/URL]). That little foot-tapping bit at the beginning pretty much gets me every time. Plus, Russian Roulette is unbelievably catchy. -Dominion Tank Police ([URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU9SCjCaibs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU9SCjCaibs[/URL]) The veterans probably saw this on the Sci-fi channel way back when. HOT DANCE IN CHERRY MOON! -Macross ([URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRemIClpTn0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRemIClpTn0[/URL]). This theme is probably encoded in the national DNA of Japan at this point. ALSO: whatever happened to all those ops sung by awesome, vibrato-heavy baritones? -Hokuto no Ken ([URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mttb-uaOOyU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mttb-uaOOyU[/URL]). Three words: you, wa, and S-H-O-C-K. -Bubblegum Crisis ([URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVnz_-j6MQQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVnz_-j6MQQ[/URL]). I may be cheating on this one, since it's not technically an op but is in fact the whole opening sequence for the show. Still, what way to start your series. And it's a great song too, courtesy of Priss and the Repricants. God, that's enough '80s for now.

Well, err, this isn't really my area, but I'll see if I can clear up the discussion a little. First of all, its crucial that yin and yang should [I]not [/I] be understood as energy types or substances of a certain kind, at least as far as something like a "substance" is usually thought of. It's totally missing the idea to think of taking a certain amount of each, mixing them together as if following a cookbook, and getting a particular thing as a result. Rather, the interaction of yin and yang (and it always has to be an interaction - neither is complete without the second) is understood as a [I]precondition[/I] for anything to exist at all, in the same way as you couldn't have any particular object without it being situated in time and space. Yang and yin together ground the complimentary movements of heaven and earth, man and woman, hot and cold, etc. - again, it's not that everything that is is a "mix" of them, but that [I]to exist at all[/I] means existing in the field created by the interaction between the two. I say again: they are not substances or objects, they are preconditions for [I]any[/I] substances or objects to appear, and also ways of measuring and understanding those things. Properly understood, it makes no more sense to say that yin and yang don't "exist" than it does to say that centimeters or hours don't exist - it's just the wrong kind of question to ask. [quote name='The13thMan][FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]Yin and yang balance each other out making things neutral. Are you saying that Hitler was nuetral? Or was he mostly evil? Sure, there could have been some good in the guy, but not enough to make up for all of his acts of evil.[/COLOR'] [/FONT][/quote]Well, this is inaccurate in two ways. First, yin and yang are not always "balanced," although even using this word is to fall back into the idea of a "mix" which can either be equal or unequal. It's not a question of whether something is balanced or imbalanced (the gods are [I]supposed[/I] to be yang-heavy, for instance), it's whether how the forces in play on a thing (or, if you like, "how it acts") accord in a stable way with that thing's own nature and the nature of the world around it. How Hitler is "structured" by yin, yang, and various other forces (which I won't get into) is only "good" or "bad" in terms of whether that structure is basically unstable and dangerous in the context of where it's placed. In Hitler's case, "danger" and "instability" are understatements. Second, and maybe I should've mentioned this earlier, the absolute [I]last[/I] thing that yin and yang are are "evil" and "good." Again, this would be like assigning a moral category to a yardstick. And no, "good" isn't balance and "evil" imbalance, as if the people concerned with yin and yang were AD&D-style druids; absolute moral judgments of that kind just don't enter into this. Rather, the purpose of keeping track of yin and yang is stability, harmony, everyday reliability, and keeping things running for the purposes of keeping a healthy community (think Miyazaki). When you get instability, mismatches, and other screw-ups, on the other hand, bad things happen. The idea is similar to what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter when it crashed because no one remembered to convert one little English measurement to metric: this isn't "evil," it's just unfortunate, a poor miscalculation, and a complete waste. Well, I hope that helps a little, anyways!

Well, in lieu of mentioning songs from a couple of dozen shows, I'll just go ahead and drop this one thing: [URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAUuDmRb1M]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAUuDmRb1M[/URL] Good luck getting that out of your head, by the way. Ya-ku-so-ku yo!!~

[quote][SIZE=1]The wise student hears of the Tao and practices it diligently. The average student hears of the Tao and gives it thought now and again. The foolish student hears of the Tao and laughs aloud. If there were no laughter, the Tao would not be what it is. Hence it is said: The bright path seems dim; Going forward seems like retreat; The easy way seems hard; The highest Virtue seems empty; Great purity seems sullied; A wealth of Virtue seems inadequate; The strength of Virtue seems frail; Real Virtue seems unreal. The perfect square has no corners; Great talents ripen late; The highest notes are hard to hear; The greatest form has no shape. The Tao is hidden and without name. The Tao alone nourishes and brings everything to fulfillment. -Laozi, chpt. 10[/SIZE][/quote]Unfortunately there's no way I can explain what this passage means, as I'm still trying to get a grasp on it myself. If I ever manage to fully understand it in a way so that I'm actually able to do it justice, [I]then[/I] I might give it shot, but that's not going going to happen for years (if ever).

Ouran's one of my guilty pleasures for the season, along with Princess^2 and High School Girls (and Kyou no 5 no 2, which doesn't really count since it's an OVA). The pedigree for this thing has a strong bloodline running from Utena; it's like a shoujo series that's been riced up to run on pure innuendo and adolescent sexual energy. Already three episodes in the writers seem to have found their favorites (re: ridiculously overplayed sexuality) in the incestuous yaoi twins, if that tells you anything. Well, to sum up, basically it's all kinds of fun if you have a taste for implied (and not-so-implied) deviancy.

I think I've said this at too much length elsewhere, but we really shouldn't even start talking about whether or not something's original until we have some idea of what the word "originality" means, which right now I think we only understood in a completely vague way (and please don't tell me "something's original if you haven't seen it before," "originality is just an opinion" etc.). If we don't accomplish this kind of rethinking of originality then I'm afraid any discussion we can have is just going to amount to dissecting shows to find out who influenced what, constantly arguing over whether some little thing is "new" or just derived from something else, or diving back into the past to try to find some mythical ur-show that was created totally in isolation. It becomes a hunt for [I]novelty[/I], and novelty doesn't have anything to do with being original. And it's a hunt that takes us away from what we should really be doing, which is watching these shows and trying to follow how they move. Maybe I'm being too much of an old fogey here. Now, of course we're going to naturally compare this show to that show and say that one mech looks like another, one character is designed like a second, one scene is obviously a homage to an older one, etc.. There's nothing wrong with this, but I find it mostly superficial and unimportant. For instance, in the Evangelion/Rahxephon case there are clearly countless little parallels between the shows (the music, the ending, the violence in some of the fights, the cryptic bad guys, the conspiratorial stuff, etc.) but ultimately, if you're paying attention, you should notice that they really think completely differently. Evangelion (I'm showing a bit of my hand here) is a show about children - "childhood" understood here not as a certain age but as being in an alienated, lonely, needy state in-between the womb (nourishment from one's mother) and adulthood (when one is capable of supporting oneself and truly loving others). Now, Rahxephon doesn't have anything to do with this. Rahxephon thinks in terms of the escape and overthrowing of a false present by way of reappropriating the truth of the past... which, again, is not what Eva's doing at all. And uh, I don't have the time to go into this any more deeply here. But those are the kernels for the shows, anyways. A clearer way of putting all of the above is to say that it's much more rewarding to see what a show is [I]doing[/I], how it thinks and moves and poses itself, rather than just what it looks like superficially. Doing this obviously requires that we pay very, very close attention, which is more difficult than it sounds.

Oh, good, I get to use this quote again: "There is nothing so entertaining as the discussion of a book nobody has read." Myself included, of course. Criticism of the book itself aside (which should wait until I've actually read the thing), it's interesting that this thing has ended up becoming such a sensation. You never really got this kind of excitement from the general public when the older Nag Hammadi documents started appearing, for instance (academics, on the other hand, ate the stuff up). I blame the coattails of The Da Vinci Code, the fans of which are probably wetting their pants at the idea of secret teachings Jesus gave only to the one who finally turned him in. The only thing missing is a centuries-long conspiracy to keep said teachings under wraps... rather than, say, some random rich guy thoughtlessly storing the Judas codex in a bank vault in Ohio.

Well, to resolve this question we could of course make up a long list of qualities of what makes something anime as opposed to not anime, and then say something like, "If a piece of animated visual entertainment [already vague, of course, but I dare someone to do better] has all of these qualities or a sufficient amount, then it is anime." If we were [I]really[/I] bored that day we could further subdivide our anime category into smaller subgroups, e.g. shounen, yaoi &c., with their own qualities. Of course, I'd be willing to bet that we couldn't get more than five minutes into such a project without hitting debates as to whether this or that quality is too wide (more things than just anime have it) or too narrow (not all of what we would call anime has it), which of these qualities are absolutely crucial and which aren't, and so on. Within hours you'd have wikipedia-esque edit wars, with the losers going home crying and taking all their toys with them. Now, with this in mind I would propose that all the time used working up such a strict categorization would be better spent rewatching the rad-as-all-get-out fight scene between Tifa and that guy whose name I can't remember (but who had the victory theme on his cell, as I recall).

Good god, man, it'd be like trying to make an anime out of the Old Testament. I think one of the reasons the live action LOTR adaptions worked so well was because Tolkien had managed to put so many small, human elements into the original - the pipe-smoking bits and so on, which of course got very much played up and accentuated in the movies (the Gimli/Legolas rivalry, the Arwen/Aragorn romance, &c.). There's practically none of that in the Silmarillion, which is incredibly hardcore epic stuff and simply doesn't allow that kind of character-centered downtime which plays so well on the screen. I know you say specifically that you don't think a live-action adaption would work, but an anime probably wouldn't do much better for pretty much the same reason. I just don't think the sheer [I]heaviness[/I] of the thing would translate well.

[quote name='Dagger']At least so far, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a great show, and it's certainly taken the online community by storm.[/quote]Justifiably so, for once! Seriously though, this season has been a really wonderful one for comedies and lighter fare so far, but Haruhi just completely outclasses the rest from the start. Pretty much the exact moment the "op" for episode 0 starts up, with Mikuru hobbling along with a vintage early-'90s-style pop song like she'd rather be doing anything else in the world but singing, you know you're in for something special. And three episodes in they've actually managed to get [I]funnier[/I] ("I'll say that the whole club was planning on g***-r**** her!"). In all truth, I don't think there's been a straight comedy anime this good since Guu (no, Azumanga doesn't count). If the entire internet (not just the fansub folks, but apparently also the homegrown nihonjin) is really abuzz about this thing, for once it's because it's really deserved. (incidentally, it also includes Yuki, another member from the "quiet, withdrawn, intensely intellectual" catalogue, for me to fixate on after the poor treatment of Black Cat's Eve by her show. GEEK TANGENT: did anyone else notice that the book Yuki handed over in episode 3 was Hyperion?)

At any given moment I am pretty much absolutely terrified. Although this is probably not that uncommon, I think.

[quote name='orochisnake]there's plenty of things in the Bible i will never understand. :animesigh[/QUOTE][QUOTE=KatanaViolet']Again, I'm sure if I actually read the bible and critiqued it, I'd have more to say; but I'm not Christian, and I'm not a theologist, so I don't know much.[/quote]All the more reason to study. Let me explain how I feel about this, putting it in the context of the interpretation question. Christians typically called "fundamentalists" often get accused of taking the bible "literally." This is untrue. Ask any of them if Jesus being the "lion of the tribe of Judah" means that he was actually running around Jerusalem chasing gazelles (which would be the literal reading), and they'll probably tell you you're nuts. They don't read literally at all - they read "what the bible says." That phrase basically means that they read it without attempting any interpretation at all. This amounts to picking out small passages which are then understood in the way which seems most immediately obvious... as if the only the understanding most grounded in "common sense" could be the correct one, and as if two millenia didn't sit between the bible and the people reading it. No pats on the back for all you "non-fundamentalists" out there, either, this isn't something that's just happening in the red states. [I]Everyone[/I] seems to believe that the best and the "purest" way to read anything (bible included) is to read slack-jawed and with the mind totally empty. The idea seems to be that if you aren't actually [I]thinking[/I] while reading, you won't bring any "prejudices" in to ruin the perfect, undirtied information the book is going to give to you. This is complete crap: reading without interpreting only means you're interpreting badly and interpreting irresponsibly. Saying "everything's an interpretation" and plopping down, convinced that anything else is futile, is only a slight improvement. Want to find the perfect way to read something? Well, good luck: you're not going to get one without struggling for a long, long time against the distance separating you and what you're reading, which very few seem interested in doing. But reading while thinking you don't have to (or shouldn't) actively interpret is like thinking you won't get in an accident if you drive with a blindfold on. The bible is especially bad about this, because at best it tends to just get glanced over, read either as a list of rules or as some kind of novel translated from greek and hebrew. More often, though, people just use it to construct little collections of phrases they happen to like. As the saying goes, "There is nothing so entertaining as the discussion of a book nobody has read." EDIT: Boss, although the match isn't quite right, I already more or less hit your Constantine point in a response to a previous thread, which you can read [URL=http://www.otakuboards.com/showthread.php?t=52741&page=3]here[/URL] (it's about halfway down). To sum up: no, Constantine didn't assemble [i]the[/i] bible, there were countless collections of biblical texts floating around at the time and there are still a number of different bibles in use today. Constantine [I]did[/I] get the early church leaders together, lock them in a room, and get them to come up with the Nicene creed, though, which effectively unified the church; it's true that the early fathers did a very efficient job of squelching "heresies" and alternative Christian texts, but this was something going on long after Constantine had already kicked it. And yes, It should be remembered, as you point out, that [i]people[/i] wrote the books of the bible and [i]people[/i] assembled them together (through a very long process of negotiation) into our present collections. How this gets forgotten, I'm not sure.

[quote name='shinji172']Also, i should note that when i asked "Is the Bible right?" I should have asked "Is the bible consistant?". I apologise for that misunderstanding. To clarify, does the text agree with itself? Hopefully that should get rid of misunderstanding.[/quote]Well, I think this is a less problematic question than "is the bible right?" but I'm still a little unclear. Particularly, I'm not sure what you mean by asking if it "agrees" all the way through. Certainly the entire thing is deeply concerned with the relationship between God (albeit a god who apparently has several names...) and the Israelites (or, in the NT, those chosen to be saved), so in that sense the entire thing has a common topic for what is to be discussed and debated. On the other hand, if you're asking if all factual data in the bible matches, if all the writers of the bible agree on what happened during a specific event, or if themes in the various books are always consistent, obviously not. You yourself disproved the first with the Jacob/Eli thing, you can discount the second after comparing, say, the accounts of the invasion of Israel in Joshua and Judges, and the third can be pretty well dispensed with by comparing, say, James to some of the Paul letters (Romans, Philippians, etc.). So, I think there's agreement in the bible in certain senses while not in others. [quote name='Charles']The bible is all about interpretation.[/quote]Correct; any reading of the bible has to be an interpretation of it. However, it's important to recognize when one says this that certain interpretations have more weight to them than others, in light of a good couple of centuries' worth of theology, historical research, lingustic analysis, translation attempts, etc.. Even without all of this, though, interpretation is never something completely arbitrary.

Well, criticising or discussing anime and manga when you haven't really sat your butt down, dedicated yourself, and absorbed [i]hundreds of hours[/i] of the stuff in your off time is basically the same thing as talking about how the German language "sounds" when you can't actually speak a single sentence of it. The folks who do this probably mean well, but usually they just miss the point entirely. (note: this also means that you're not likely to "argue" your way into getting someone to like anime; to use a bad simile, it's like trying to explain how to fret a G major chord to someone who's never held a guitar before)

[quote name='gundampali23']come on man there isnt any power in the middle east anyway , it is all Isreal running the show.[/quote]I hope I'm reading you right. If it am, it means either that we've been checking very different sources, or we have completely different ideas of what "power" and "running the show" mean. It's almost nonsensical to claim that the middle east states (barring Israel, I guess?) don't have any power. Granted, a nation like Saudi Arabia (who I take as my example here) doesn't have the kind of overwhelming military strength of the U.S., but these are [i]not[/i] helpless victims waiting to get shot by the IDF. These guys are the ones guarding and allowing or disallowing access to the lifeblood of the world economy - if you're a developed country dependent on oil, you do [i]not[/i] want to get them pissed at you. There's a reason the U.S. government is propping up the House of Saud's regime, and it's not because Bush and co. are all big fans of Salafism and the use of amputation for the punishment of criminals. How is this not power? As for Israel "running the show," while they're certainly [i]the[/i] premier military power in the region (and they certainly show no shyness about using it...), I find it difficult to believe that a nation of some seven million people could be "running" a region housing a couple of [i]hundred[/i] million. This is especially true given that many of the latter do not recognize the former as even having a legitimate claim to statehood. Unless the Israelis have a vast and secret world-controlling conspiracy going on (wait, I think I've heard this one before), I don't see how they could possibly have much control over the region beyond pointing to their military and their nukes and saying, "Don't **** with us." [quote name='gundampali23']And look at it his way when Iran announced that they are enriching uranium, who was going nuts and wanted to fire their "weapons of mass destruction".[/quote]Well, in order: first, pretty much the [I]entire U.N.[/I] was going nuts, and second, [i]no one[/i] was proposing launching WMDs. Even the U.S., by far the most pushy of all parties, is right now only brandishing a military strike as a threat. I'm certainly not going to defend Bush and his cronies on anything else here, but their official policy has been diplomacy, albeit with an "OR ELSE" added on that should make the rest of us very, very wary. Given Hirsh's recent article (linked above) I'm very worried that this "diplomatic approach" will end up being complete bull, but even if a strike happens (and god help us if it does) the use of NBC weapons by America would be next to unthinkable. [quote name='gundampali23']You want to talk about unbalance what about Rice saying that to stop a nucleur crisis that they will draw up plans with India.[/quote]Well, although the India treaty was a stupid move on the administration's part in very obvious violation of reams of settled international law, I don't think its signing coinciding with the Iran thing was much more than a coincidence. The U.S. has been courting India for years now, after all. Now, it is, of course, complete hypocracy for the U.S. to demand that Tehran face up to international standards when it itself has just flaunted a good number of such standards... but that doesn't mean that trying to deal with the present crisis in Iran in whatever way isn't the right thing to do. There's just too much at stake to sit on the sidelines and make fun of U.S. foreign policy for being two-faced. (also, what's this about a "nucleur (sic) crisis?" I'm not sure what you're referring to here)

Okay, I'll give it a shot, although the question of what to do about Iran getting nukes is a heck of a nut to try cracking and my international politics skills probably aren't up for it. And I won't even try to tackle the Israel/Palestine question, which is even thornier than Iran and has been going on for decades longer. Okay, so is Iran really going after nukes? Probably, although there's nothing resembling a smoking gun on this yet. Look at how Iran's been presenting itself on this: if all it cared about was nuclear power it could have easily accepted a deal with Russia to enrich uranium outside of its own borders (or something similar even earlier), with what would almost certainly be unanimous international acceptance. Instead, it flaunts the IAEA and insists, in such a way to piss everyone off, that it has the right to do the enrichment on its own soil. This is extremely heavy posturing: at the very least it's an attempt to assert Iran's status as an international power, regardless of whether it ever gets nuclear energy or not. But the bottom line is: if Iran can now enrich uranium, from there on out it only has to spend a few years (maybe ten, tops) working on the technics before it gets nuclear weaponry. Given Iran's obvious ambitions to ramp up its regional power, given its long history of not remotely caring whether the rest of the world likes it, and given that it knows that states like Israel and Pakistan already have the things, it seems to me very doubtful that they won't try to go for it. So, if Iran gets nukes, then what happens? Well, first off, it would severely alter the balance of power in the region. Politics would completely change. More than likely it would prompt an arms race and, left unchecked, would lead to nuclear proliferation throughout the middle east. Some have argued that this would actually stabilize the region, given that only madmen would lead nuclear-powered states into direct conflict with each other (rather than fighting through proxies). I'm not convinced. First off, the states in the region with nukes would not always be democracies (e.g. the U.S., India) or self-interested oligarchies (e.g. the former USSR): rather, they'd often be autocracies, theocracies, or even worse, states of loose affiliations between regional warlords. This is [i]not[/i] a good environment to have WMDs floating around in, or one that lends hope to MAD theories of peace. Second, Iran itself has been making some aggressive noises, and it's remotely possible they might just be nuts enough to [i]use[/i] their nukes. Although personally I think their talk, especially the stuff about about "wiping Israel off the map," is mainly just rhetoric, it's still possible that in the the next decade Tel Aviv will end up a smoking crater... and then very, very bad things will happen. Third, the middle east has no shortage of very powerful extra-governmental organizations such as terror groups. With nuclear proliferation, it seems almost inevitable that nukes would eventually fall into the hands of a Hezbollah or (far less likely) a Hamas or even an Al Qaeda. It would be bad enough if they just jockied for power with the nukes, but they're also among the most likely people to actually [i]use[/i] one of the things... and again, very, very bad things will happen. Okay, those are the risks, so what can the international community (or, more specifically, the U.S.) do about it? First, obviously it can let it happen. This wouldn't be the [i]worst[/i] choice, I don't think, but it's certainly not the best, even though various talking heads seem to think a nuclear Iran is now inevitable. Again, this would be bad for all the reasons listed above. Second, the U.N. could take action. This is possible, but I find it extremely unlikely that the U.N. will do anything that will actually have any effect. Now, factions in the U.S. seem to want to use sanctions to make Iran, essentially, into North Korea, i.e. a state which may have nukes but is economically caput. This won't happen, at least not to a degree which would be effective: unlike NK, Iran is sitting on a huge amount of oil, which means that anyone doing anything to it risks a massive cut in their petroleum bloodline. The UN Security Council doesn't have the cojones for this, unless Iran does something so drastic that its hand is forced. No, more than likely all the U.N. will do is slap Iran on the hand and tell it to shape up. Third, a military attack. Now, the fallout from such a strike would range from extremely bad to completely catastrophic; domestic support would be almost null, the international outrage (especially from muslims) would be extreme, it would immediately mobilize extremely powerful terrorist groups like Hezbollah against the U.S., and worst of all it would probably completely reverse all the ill will Iranians currently feel towards their government. Nevertheless, it's still on the table, and Seymour Hersh wrote a now-infamous article [URL=http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact](linked here)[/URL] on the White House's considerations of this option (which should be read by, oh, everyone). The first option would be an airstrike to eliminate Iranian nuclear projects. This would at best be a temporary solution, as Iran has spread its program over any number of sites with many of them probably unknown to U.S. intelligence and some so deep underground that only a tactical nuke could hit them (which I doubt even the present administration is stupid enough to try). It would put them back by a few years, tops. Second, the U.S. could try to "decapitate" the present Iranian government and hope whoever comes in afterwards will be more agreeable. This is just as tricky as the first option, as the mullahs and their civilian stooges are quite paranoid and would probably disappear the moment they caught wind of such a plan. Third, rather than the U.S. doing anything, have Israel perform options one or two. This is far more difficult from the tactical point of view, and even more likely to end up useless; worse, no one will be fooled, and the political fallout could end up even more drastic. Fourth, a full-on Iraq-style invasion and occupation with regime-change in mind. This is the only option that can clear out Iran's nuke programs completely, but let's be clear: the U.S. [i]cannot do this[/i], it's simply stretching the military too far. Controlling a state the size of Iraq is already pushing things - Iran is far, far larger, and has greater complications to it too numerous to name. So, to sum up, any military action against Iran risks being useless and will end up as diplomatic suicide; if it has any use at all, it's only as a big ugly threat for the U.S. to wave around while it pursues other options. Fourth, and perhaps nuttiest of all, is "Nixon goes to China." Essentially the idea is to reestablish relations with Iran, give it inducements to play nice with the rest of the world, and hope that as a result of this it can be "tamed." This was first proposed by, of all people, Christopher Hitchens (infamous British hawk), and to me seems almost crazy enough to work [URL=http://www.slate.com/id/2137560/](article linked here)[/URL]. The key is Iran's own population, which is very westernized, overwhelmingly pro-America, and increasingly dissatisfied with its own government and lack of political representation (the last election for president ended up being between a conservative and a more-conservative - as you know, the more-conservative won). The hope for pulling a Nixon is that the mullahs won't be able to sustain themselves as legitimate in the eyes of their people without increasingly giving ground to reform - as in China in recent years. Personally, I think this is the "best" (well, least-bad) idea of all those listed above: a slight humiliation on America's part in return for the very likely possibility of dealing with a completely different Iran by the time they might get working nukes. Good god, I think I just wrote an encyclopedia entry. Well, in any case, these are the only options I know of so far, although I'm open to others if anyone has any alternative ideas.

[quote name='Diablo']I know, most animes can't give you everything you want in the 1st episode, but hey.... at that moment that's what I wanted. (More action)[/quote]Hee hee. Give it another week... trust me on this. You'll be picking action out of your ears for a good day or two after the fight in the second ep. (there's some lag time after that, which may also be referred to as "character work," but it comes back soon enough) I'm a little upset that CN decided to cut off the op (and the ed, to a lesser degree), considering DAYS is one of my favorite op songs to come out in the past few years. I'm also slightly disappointed with the dub (they didn't really nail Renton and Eureka), but eh give it a few episodes to see if they hit a groove.

(why do I only seem to reply whenever Eva pops up?) Well first of all, it should be noted that the [spoiler]Asuka-in-a-tub[/spoiler] thing happens in 24, so it ends up being "canon" for both endings. Was it really [I]necessary[/I] for it to happen? Well, yes, except the important thing isn't that particular act (as crushing as it is) so much as it indicates that [spoiler]Asuka has simply ceased to will anything at all, even her own death[/spoiler]. Obviously this stems from 22 ([spoiler]the mind-rape and, in the platinum ed, her discovery of Kaji's death[/spoiler]), but also goes back to events in 19, 16, and possibly even earlier. The endings do different things with her after that. The TV series is of course, more vague on what happens after she [spoiler]gets out of the hospital bed[/spoiler] (there's one shot of her [spoiler]in the entry plug while 02 is in the lake[/spoiler]), but ultimately it's secondary to her [spoiler]taking part in instrumentality[/spoiler]. Whether or not she ever [spoiler]"recovers"[/spoiler], she still ends up psychologically stripped and laid bare to herself, which basically happens in the same way to the other characters who get the 25-26 treatment. I actually have a theory about her treatment in EoE. I sympathize with Dagger and others who think her [spoiler]"recovery"[/spoiler] was too easy, but on the other hand I think it may make more sense to interpret that scene as if she [spoiler][i]never really "recovered" at all[/i][/spoiler]. Certainly she's not [spoiler]catatonic[/spoiler] anymore, but the Asuka in that scene isn't the same (relatively sane) Asuka that you get in episode 8 and further on. [I]This[/I] Asuka likes to [spoiler]chant things about killing and how her dead mother is protecting her[/spoiler]. Certainly she's gained the will to fight again, but I don't think she's been [spoiler]"fixed"[/spoiler] by any means... on the contrary. And I think I can actually support this reading of EoE with how the animators portray her in this scene - there's very little of the easy confidence of the early Asuka shown there, instead her face is constantly twisted into expressions of rage, cruelty, violence, and mania. Well, take it with a grain of salt, but for me the scene reads better.

Probably that I read too much continental philosophy, and also that I got here after the OB and MyO linking was already busted. ;__;

Well first of all, being a nitpicker I really have to object to how the word "mysticism" is used in the topic title. T tanukioh I think in your talk about "nature" you're coming close (mysticism is, if I can get technical for a second, an ontological mode), but I really would like to be clear about the term. Mysticism doesn't necessarily have anything to do with myths, magic, or even philosophy (well, understood in the typical modern sense at least). It is a certain way that the world is (and, usually, how God is) and, in an inseperable way, how the world is to be experienced by human beings. Do things like gods and spirits actually exist, that is, are there physical beings out there who will match their descriptions? I have no idea, although I guess it's remotely possible for me to open my door and see one wandering along the street one day. But even if they don't "exist" in the traditional scientific sense, certainly they still [i]participate[/i]. Anyone who thinks that, for example, a chinese earth god for a local village doesn't do anything in the community is kidding themselves. Anyone who thinks that magic (I use this word in the wide sense) has no effect on human lives is really just not understanding the situation. Magic may not [i]work[/i], obviously, and I dare anyone to keep up something which is intended to have an effect but never pans out. But the usual way that we understand any meaning magic (or whatever) may have as merely psychological, ideological, etc. already misrepresents what's going on and from the beginning fails to get any grip on it. Or, to put this another way: the most interesting questions about magic (or whatever), the ones that are actually going to matter, are not the ones devoted to showing very quickly that it's all fakey, hokey nonsense. Instead, they're the ones which try to understand how it works (the logic behind it), why it means anything, i.e. fundamentally the questions that try to address magic [i]as[/i] magic, as a [i]phenomenon[/i] in itself and not as something just psychological. And at [i]that[/i] point you can do a really [i]good[/i] job of showing that it's fakey, hokey nonsense, if you'd like. But probably more useful than merely axing a certain "belief system" (I put it in scare quotes because "believing," commonly understood, has nothing to do with what's going on) is gaining a far greater understanding of how human beings fundamentally think and interact with their world. Which may or may not include gods, spirits, etc., by the way. Okay, one more thing and then I'll stop. [quote name='tanukioh']O.o please explain some of this dying out thing. o.o as far as I've heard, gods don't die, and spirits are...hard to kill.[/quote]Actually, this happens fairly commonly; I'm thinking in particular of some of the deaths that take place in Norse myth. Closer to home, Buddhist gods also die (their being really immortal just wouldn't make sense in the context). And, of course, there's always Nietzsche's infamous "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!"

[quote name='Cutie_Gurl_1990']Okay, who here actually believes in god[/quote]Not yet. Maybe one day. If we're talking about my belief or nonbelief in the existence of a (meta-)physical being named "God," then I don't know what to say. I don't know enough about what God is to seriously try to answer the question, and it really seems like too dangerous a question to be hasty about. If we're talking about the Christian idea of faith, that is, as to whether I've been hit with "belief in god" as a kind of saving power, then no, I haven't been saved yet. Again, maybe one day.

Most recently? Trinity Blood. I should have known by the first episode that it was going nowhere fast and doing so as a fashionable vampire Trigun. But nooo, I had to give it a good couple of hours before I finally dropped it off. As for NGE, despite it being far and away my favorite show, I can understand why people don't like it (for various reasons). I will say this: if you haven't already gotten "into" it by, say, the 12th episode, then there's really no point in going on as all you're going to feel is confused, cheated, and very angry. Eva requires, above all else, a certain relationship with the characters. You don't really have to "like" them, and actually you don't really even have to understand where they're coming from. To put this a certain way: fundamentally, you've got to have the SAME PROBLEM that they do, or it doesn't work. Over and over again in the show you hear the line "you're the same as I am;" it ain't just Anno blowing smoke, and the same line goes for the audience. If you can't feel that those animated folks on the screen are somehow representing YOU, acting from the same issues that you have (although in a different way), then all NGE will be is a whinefest and a big biblical lightshow. Your time is better spent elsewhere. But, uh, yeah. Anyways. Trinity Blood: pretty, Trigun clone, goes nowhere at all.

The13thMan - go read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. No really, I'm serious, it's actually fairly quick and painless and tackles precisely the questions you seem concerned with. You'd like it! I should note again, just to keep things honest, that the weirdness about things both "existing" and "not existing" at the same time that y'all seem to be worrying about [i]only happens in non-deterministic interpretations of quantum theory[/i], specifically Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation (which I explained above) and any other interpretations involving measurement (or "conscious observation," one of the variants) causing the collapse of all the possibilities involved in a waveform. Again: other interpretations have NO PROBLEM with this, i.e. for them things really are what they are at any given time (although there may be things like alternate univeses...), so Schrodinger's Cat shouldn't be taken as representative of the entire field of quantum physics. And actually, from what little I've done paying attention to the people who really work on this kind of thing, they spend very little time cogitating about what the universe may be like; mostly it involves doing a lot of math which is, uh, completely beyond me. Metaphysics is a side effect at best. Okay, side note. The worst charge that's been leveled at the Copenhagen interpretation (which, I say again, is the one where we can say nothing about the existence of a quantum object until it is measured) is this. Assuming quantum mechanics is [i]the[/i] fundamental, underlying physical reality of the universe, then that means that [i]everything that exists[/i] is part of one big quantum system. Now, since for Copenhagen neither the existence nor nonexistence of any element in a quantum system can be determined until measurement, this means that everything that is is unverifiable unless measured. This is a problem when the measurement tools [i]themselves[/i], including everything in our lab and ourselves, are of course also quantum objects. The big question ends up being, what finally constitutes measurement? At what point does the waveform finally break down? The obvious answer is to impart some kind of special quality to the observing subject (i.e. the scientist), but it's a bit tougher to determine what exactly would make such an observer special. I'm willing to throw this one to the audience. (again, it's worth noting that most scientists, perhaps unjustly, find this kind of question silly; the results work, why worry about it?)

Oh, I'm sorry! In my first post I must've assumed we were discussing people who actually had mental and behavioral illnesses severe enough to keep them from living their lives in a fulfilling and meaningful manner, and what obligation society has to help them in whatever way. Had I been paying attention I would have known we were actually talking about how all of us are just TOO NUTS for the rest of the SQUARES to handle!!! They just don't know how to deal with [i]weirdos[/i] like us, man!! That's why they've gotta PERSECUTE us by... you know... by... like, uh... well... *AHEM* Anyways we are totally not insane like they say we are!!!! WELL OKAY THEY MAY NOT ACTUALLY SAY WE'RE INSANE AT ALL BUT THEY IMPLY IT WITH THEIR DISAPPROVING GLARES!! The truth is that THEY'RE the insane ones for trying to KEEP US DOWN!!! Our music is too hard for them, our clothes are just [i]pushing the edge and about to break loose[/i]!!!! They can't handle true madness!!! Down with the man!! Their square ways ain't gonna las- ...s-say, who's that guy sitting in the alley over there? he's been holding his ears and rocking back and forth for the last few minutes, i-it's kinda creepy. dudes let's go rock out how ABNORMAL we are somewhere else, o-okay?