Quote from: augustocroppo on November 09, 2012, 04:01:31 PM

I asked for your opinion regarding your political views. Everyone able to express it thoughts are qualified to form and to present an opinion.

No, not everyone are qualified to express opinions on everything. Politics is one area where this observation is often forgotten. See http://paulgraham.com/identity.html and the somewhat related http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/.

Quote from: augustocroppo on November 09, 2012, 04:01:31 PM

Your refusal to present yours only shows that you are not willing to reveal certain aspects of your character in this forum.

On the contrary, if you didn't choose to disregard my response you'd see it reveals quite a bit about my character. I am not interested in politics. I don't read/watch the news. When people start a heated argument about the latest politics thingy I don't have my own piece of mind I make sure everyone knows, I sit it out hoping the conversation will shift to something I can contribute to. As far as your specific question "regarding the diplomatic relations of Israel with Iran and Palestine", I have very little factual knowledge, not enough to verbally express an opinion, let alone one that is robust to new knowledge. I can't recall much of what I knew or thought because this is not meaningful enough for me to be encoded in memory. Contrary to what you seem to think, the response in my mind to your question wasn't "I believe that X Y Z! But I'm not telling." It's more like reaching into my mind to find something relevant to say and getting only a blank.

Sure, if I wanted I guess I could read up on some history and recent developments, analyze the facts and figure out what I think of them. But I have no interest in doing that.

Maybe if you asked some leading questions this would become an aided recall task which is easier.

Quote from: augustocroppo on November 09, 2012, 04:01:31 PM

It was your decision to step up in the stage of the public scrutiny when you started this thread. You assumed the position of being questioned and now you are afraid to answer the questions.

I have answered your questions to the best of my ability, you are the one who chose to assume I am hiding something. If you want a more detailed response ask a more focused question.

Quote from: augustocroppo on November 09, 2012, 04:01:31 PM

I am not trying to dictate how you should think.

Read again. You are not dictating how I should think, you are saying what I think, e.g. "You have an opinion as everyone else", "You are or you not are."

Quote from: augustocroppo on November 08, 2012, 11:23:45 PM

You are or you not are. There is no middle point between theism and atheism.

Religion is about more than a given set of beliefs, there is a strong cultural component. One may respect and be attracted to the culture and tradition regardless of the truth value of the associated beliefs.

If beliefs are all that you are interested in, it is rarely a good idea to be absolutely certain in something of any complexity. A Bayesian assigns a subjective probability p to the truth of any statement. If the statement is "the beliefs associated with religion X are generally true", then theism would be p~1, atheism would be p~0, and any 0
As for me, I don't find the beliefs underlying Judaism to be likely true, but I don't rule out the possibility.

Quote from: Herodes on November 09, 2012, 04:12:05 PM

Quote

I unfortunately agreed to help one Alberto Armandi to raise funds for Bitdaytrade, a margin trading platform he was working on, through the BDT bonds on GLBSE. It didn't work out so well. The story is not over yet, but due to either malice or incompetence of Alberto, he now has a debt of about 10K BTC which he seems unable or unwilling to repay.

I wonder why anyone would need 10K BTC to make a website ? That's more money than most visitors with full time jobs on this forum make in one year. Any site that requires some amount of work could take considerable time to make, but I think this was a little bit too much..

It was not supposed to be "a site". It was supposed to be a trading platform which needs reserves to be able to hedge its position. The BDT bonds thread detailed some other planned expenses. I actually think $70K (what it was worth at the time) is too little to do such a service properly. It was still much more than should have been trusted with someone without more solid credentials, though.