"Slick Willy got a blowjob and it was the end of the world"
No, he committed perjury. Wasn't he disbarred for that?
You say perjury like the guy was lying about weapons of mass destruction. Please, he lied about being an adulterer. That's something cared about only by arrogant pricks who like to enforce their morals on others yet are just as culpable for the same dirty dealings.
It's not just fundamentalists that are the problem. It's religion as a whole, because it's a very pervasive and invasive world-view. A fundamentalist is a lot like a deity. They need worshipers/people that are willing to listen to their jibe in order to have an effect.
We'd have no problem with the various pseudosciences in the world if people had a little less faith and exercised a little more incredulity and skepticism. But instead you have huge segments of the population that don't even know what science is, and distrust their false image of the scientific method. It's not usually the fundamentalist at all who gets into trouble by believing in woo-woo, quackery, and pseudosciences. It's the desperate. Take parents of a child with cancer. They are so desperate they get sucked into paying loads of cash for some psychic/spiritual healer/naturopath who has some theories they pulled from their ass. Their faith in "something greater" and utter desperation is what takes the kid off chemo and leads to his ultimate death.
It always cracks me up when people talk about how close-minded skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists, etc. are. Yet most of those people:
1) rarely have strong emotional attachments to woo-woo (i.e., what does the skeptic care of physics really do have ESP? Not a lick. But the psychics sure have a heavy investment)
2) can be convinced of something if there is evidence presented in a good fashion. Good always means scientific because other evidence usually boils down to personal anecdote
3) tend to educate themselves about a lot.
And you want to tell me that a person who has "faith" in some cosmic conscious energy floating through everything, some deity, something you can never objectively point out to others, and rejects good-intentioned data collection methods (science) is somehow open minded?
I do not think infinitesimal is the right characterization. A point is supposed to have no physical size, i.e., 0. Zero, however is not an infinitesimal.
Sure, if finishing expansions is your main criterion for classifying guilds.
You'll see this too in MUDs, which I am more familiar with. You have some people who've usually been playing for 3-5 years that have awesome equipment, are the highest level, have amassed a fortune, yet anyone who's been around for a bit longer pays them no heed. They'll probably be gone in a short while anyway. What they are primarily lacking, in a MUD, is character development. Most of the real "legends" are not high level and don't necessarily have all the awesome gear.
What does ID predict? ID is precisely not science because it begins with the conclusion and then tries to find evidence for it. That is, it starts with the assumption that there is an intelligent designer (you say it's not necessarily supernatural, but that is a strawman, since the ID designer IS the Christian God, hands down).
You are confusion something that can be tested with a scientific theory. Homeopathy can be tested and refuted too, but it doesn't make it a scientific theory.
True believers use a lot of fallacy from personal incredulity. My good friend, a hardcore Creationist, used that one and ad ignorantiam almost exclusively. Combine those two fallacies with God in the Gaps and you have Creationism.
I agree. Talking about evolution in terms of recursion really doesn't make much sense. That's not, in general, how science works. Scientific theories are "proven" via their predictive power.
You seem to suggest the false dichotomy of either religion or science. Intelligent design is not science because it is pseudoscience, but then, so is religion essentially. However, to call ID not religion sort of ignores the people behind the movement. The movement itself is very much a Christian fundamentalist attack on materialism. It's just a new name for Creationism, at least according to Kitzmiller vs. Dover. Is Creationism religion?
With the failure of ID to gain hold in the school systems you can expect to hear a new name sometime soon. Maybe this time they won't botch concealing things so terribly like they did with ID (compare various editions of the canonical ID/Creationism text Of Pandas and Humans).
Oddly enough, if forced implants ever came to pass one could probably use this logic to avoid participation. Religious sects get so much leeway, in the U.S. at least, it's almost sickening. Yet if you have a rational, well thought out philosophy based in humanism it's not worth a damn. Yet another strike against thinking for yourself.
Why is the parent modded insightful? All conspiracy theories regarding JFK are grand, i.e., they collapse under their own weight. People act as if there is the Official Government version and then the Independent Conspiracy versions. Really what you have is a very well studied case, and a few woo-woos out there that anomaly hunt and deal in pseudoscience/intellectual dishonesty. There is really no reason to believe that anything surprising will be revealed about the JFK case. But then, to the true believer, anyone who disagrees with them is in on the conspiracy or a dupe. At least the honest skeptic hears evidence, is usually pretty impartial, and applies the scientific method.
Parent makes it sound like illegals has this bountiful existence with grins on their face wider than the Chesire cat's due to the knowledge they are ripping off Americans.
Illegals work pretty damn hard. For some reason I'm reminded of how plantation owners would call their slaves lazy as they were riding around on a horse cracking the whip.
A lot of these people live pretty desperate lives, and we forget sometimes that they are actually people. What about kids who came illegally? There's actually a decent number of undocumented youths in the education system, including some of the more prestiges universities (such as UCLA). They have so much more to contend with than your typical suburban jackass that the sheer arrogance expressed by some of the backseat economists disgusts me.
Your assessment, in typical fashion, ignores an essential fact of budgeting. It's not an all or nothing game. Yes, we have pressing issues at home, but it's not always easy or cogent to redirect funds and people. By your logic, why don't we devote most scientific research to curing cancer and other debilitating ailments? Maybe because not every scientist is interested in these things?
Or another example might be the woefully ignorant college student who knows nothing about bond measures asking why they don't stop constructing buildings on the campus and instead spend that money to hire more professors. That's not the way things work, plain and simple, and in the long run, it's good things don't work like that.
A lot of folk, most likely lay-people, don't recognize perhaps the MOST important aspect of any scientific pursuit: innovation and inspiration. Science gets useful results because it's such an awesome tool. However, science really is just another form of entertainment. Let me give you an example from my own field. The mathematician G. H. Hardy worked extensively on the theory of numbers. He was a pure mathematician, and relished in the fact that his pursuit would never be put to use by humans. Look how wrong he was.
Saying, "Well gee what purpose does this or that have, let's cut it because it is not practical" is a position only taken out of ignorance or by the serious hard-liner. By this reasoning, we should fund almost none of the pure mathematics, and yet most of pure mathematics gets applied somewhere down the line. Usually to the great benefit of mankind.
You grossly underestimate both the problems encountered in such missions and humanity's ingenuity. Unless you have robots that possess the reasoning of humans, said robots can never achieve a fraction of what a team of humans could do.
There are some situations where you shouldn't disregard a person based on their age. This is especially true in mathematics which requires no emotional maturity. However, a child or adolescent can sometimes fail to recognize when they are plunging into woo-woo land. I suspect a lot of this has to do with a lack of refined respect on part of the youth for the giants who came before them. Look at those who extol modern pseudoscience and you will see two types: frauds and people who think like a child.
Almost every other intellectual activity, outside of the natural sciences, requires wisdom and social tact, which youths rarely possess. Even within the natural sciences youths rarely have the critical thinking skills necessary to do legit science. Skepticism and the scientific method either have to be discovered by the youth on their own (extremely rare) or taught. There is huge correlation between people who can think skeptically and scientifically and those who hold Ph.Ds in the sciences.
The thing is, that 11 year old is getting valuable leadership and teaching experience.
Erm, no. First, the situations you encounter in a fantasy MMORPG rarely have bearing on real life unless you attend a lot of conventions for the clinically weird or Furries.
Second, an MMORPG has few of the social ramifications that real interactions do. Your inhibitions are incredibly low because of this, and this translates to interacting in ways that you might possibly never do in real life. It at best gives you an outlet (like imagining what you'd do to the guy who stole your girlfriend), but I'd wager that simply imagining yourself in a leadership role provides you with more experience than playing a game.
I can see how he might gain some teaching experience, but this also is modest. The concepts in even heavily technical table-top games are elementary. Explaining an easily understood concept requires much less skill on part of the teacher than a difficult idea.
Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, a.k.a NAMBLA, have recently announced a voice chat client that you can customize to make everyone sound like 11-year old boys.
Fast trains to get to other cities would be nice, too. But... that would cost money, money people would rather give to our rich-ass school district that has so much money to burn they actually built a water park with some of it T_T
Many European countries have fantastic public transit systems. In Switzerland, for example, you can get to most any major hiking trail-head via train and bus. Considering some of these trailheads are out in the boondocks and not too far from the summit, I find this impressive.
Sure, there is such a thing as "blind faith," and it is not particularly endorsed by many religious people with a strong history of study in their faith. For example, Jesus promoted a rigor of discovery modeled after "ask, seek, knock," indicating active participation and questioning by the believer. Of course, many other religions such as Buddhism have similar tenets of discovery and journey.
Religious apologists love to use this argument because if you lump together other "beliefs" in with their faith it somehow lends credibility to why they believe in some of the nutty things they do. It is in fact the entire goal of Creationism and its derivatives.
The truth of the matter, fortunately, is entirely different. There is little that we know about the empirical world which we have to take on "faith." Faith, in fact, requires that you set aside one of the basic principals of knowledge-gathering: the ability to repeatedly point out a phenomenon to casual observer with sufficient training. Now, religious apologists also love to attack this one by the classic argument styled something like, "Oh yeah?! Well, anyone with sufficient faith can clearly see what I'm talking about!" It's kind of sad, but that pretty much amounts to the strongest argument the religious apologist has in their arsenal.
The problem, of course, is that their observations and evidence are exactly the types of non-evidence that we throw out in more legitimate pursuits of knowledge. The reason being that the human brain is really not that reliable. The average person has a ton of false memories, and there is some correlation with how old the memory is/how sure you are of it being precise and how much the real event deviates from your memory. The human brain is great at matching patterns where there are none and projecting cultural beliefs onto outside phenomenon (just see the different guises that "night terrors" take).
If you know anything about pseudoscience, you quickly realize that religion follows its dictums exactly. They are in fact, one in the same, since much of pseudoscience provides the same comforts that a religion does, and some pseudosciences can be as all encompassing a world-view as a religion (i.e., things like "naturalism").
The "faith" of the scientist and the intellectually honest knowledge seeker is not a faith at all, but it's a reasonable trust of your fellow human being. Theoretically you could fact check everything, but you trust your colleagues who say they have checked a fact to actually have checked it, or in the case of mathematics, proved it. In essence, you are not required to have any preconceived beliefs nor any emotional attachment to the subject you are studying. This is the second, and another important, delimiter between faith and reasonable trust. Those intellectual honest knowledge seekers aren't starting with any particular premise in mind, whereas the faithful have to search for evidence after already making a conclusion, and most importantly, they have to search within.
That and douchebag ideas like this make it so that consumers pay more for their product. Most of the cost of auto insurance is not because of risk of accident or liability, but the risk of fraud.
You have proof of this where? Go look at how insurance rates are calculated based on costs of various accidents and their associated probabilities and you'll see that "most" of the price has nothing to do with fraud. Ya'll sound like a bunch of yesmen tools, if you ask me;).
One important (even priceless) posession is that of cultural heritage and living tradition.
This is always brought up, implying that human tradition is so sacrosanct. Subsistence hunting is one thing, but many traditions and heritages are steeped in ridiculous mysticism, bigotry, and pseudoscience.
I mean, I know that I wholeheartedly support movements that seek to stop equality for the sexes, because it's so important to my culture to treat women like shit. Or how about those traditions of imperialism, wanton slaughter of natives, poisoning the environment.
The greater whole of humanity and the environment should always trump any cultural tradition. The real reason small indigenous groups can continue their subsistence hunting is because their impact is negligible.
Talking about culture as if it is some static thing is ridiculous in of itself. Culture changes as science progresses and social revolutions occur. Once the majority of whites realized that colored people weren't a bunch of savage slightly intelligent monkeys, most of them woke up and started treating them with some modicum of dignity. The only "culture" true to humans is that we adapt and change. Everything else is aesthetics (the clothes we wear, art we fashion, things we pray to, dreams we have).
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"Slick Willy got a blowjob and it was the end of the world" No, he committed perjury. Wasn't he disbarred for that?
You say perjury like the guy was lying about weapons of mass destruction. Please, he lied about being an adulterer. That's something cared about only by arrogant pricks who like to enforce their morals on others yet are just as culpable for the same dirty dealings.
It's not just fundamentalists that are the problem. It's religion as a whole, because it's a very pervasive and invasive world-view. A fundamentalist is a lot like a deity. They need worshipers/people that are willing to listen to their jibe in order to have an effect.
We'd have no problem with the various pseudosciences in the world if people had a little less faith and exercised a little more incredulity and skepticism. But instead you have huge segments of the population that don't even know what science is, and distrust their false image of the scientific method. It's not usually the fundamentalist at all who gets into trouble by believing in woo-woo, quackery, and pseudosciences. It's the desperate. Take parents of a child with cancer. They are so desperate they get sucked into paying loads of cash for some psychic/spiritual healer/naturopath who has some theories they pulled from their ass. Their faith in "something greater" and utter desperation is what takes the kid off chemo and leads to his ultimate death.
It always cracks me up when people talk about how close-minded skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists, etc. are. Yet most of those people:
1) rarely have strong emotional attachments to woo-woo (i.e., what does the skeptic care of physics really do have ESP? Not a lick. But the psychics sure have a heavy investment)
2) can be convinced of something if there is evidence presented in a good fashion. Good always means scientific because other evidence usually boils down to personal anecdote
3) tend to educate themselves about a lot.
And you want to tell me that a person who has "faith" in some cosmic conscious energy floating through everything, some deity, something you can never objectively point out to others, and rejects good-intentioned data collection methods (science) is somehow open minded?
Absolutely disgusting.
I do not think infinitesimal is the right characterization. A point is supposed to have no physical size, i.e., 0. Zero, however is not an infinitesimal.
Dude, the oceans were created because the earth is hollow and expanding ;)
Sure, if finishing expansions is your main criterion for classifying guilds.
You'll see this too in MUDs, which I am more familiar with. You have some people who've usually been playing for 3-5 years that have awesome equipment, are the highest level, have amassed a fortune, yet anyone who's been around for a bit longer pays them no heed. They'll probably be gone in a short while anyway. What they are primarily lacking, in a MUD, is character development. Most of the real "legends" are not high level and don't necessarily have all the awesome gear.
What does ID predict? ID is precisely not science because it begins with the conclusion and then tries to find evidence for it. That is, it starts with the assumption that there is an intelligent designer (you say it's not necessarily supernatural, but that is a strawman, since the ID designer IS the Christian God, hands down).
You are confusion something that can be tested with a scientific theory. Homeopathy can be tested and refuted too, but it doesn't make it a scientific theory.
True believers use a lot of fallacy from personal incredulity. My good friend, a hardcore Creationist, used that one and ad ignorantiam almost exclusively. Combine those two fallacies with God in the Gaps and you have Creationism.
I agree. Talking about evolution in terms of recursion really doesn't make much sense. That's not, in general, how science works. Scientific theories are "proven" via their predictive power.
You seem to suggest the false dichotomy of either religion or science. Intelligent design is not science because it is pseudoscience, but then, so is religion essentially. However, to call ID not religion sort of ignores the people behind the movement. The movement itself is very much a Christian fundamentalist attack on materialism. It's just a new name for Creationism, at least according to Kitzmiller vs. Dover. Is Creationism religion?
With the failure of ID to gain hold in the school systems you can expect to hear a new name sometime soon. Maybe this time they won't botch concealing things so terribly like they did with ID (compare various editions of the canonical ID/Creationism text Of Pandas and Humans).
Oddly enough, if forced implants ever came to pass one could probably use this logic to avoid participation. Religious sects get so much leeway, in the U.S. at least, it's almost sickening. Yet if you have a rational, well thought out philosophy based in humanism it's not worth a damn. Yet another strike against thinking for yourself.
America's power is about as illusory as China's economy. I've been living in a trashcan in Georgia for 23 years and so have all my friends!
Why is the parent modded insightful? All conspiracy theories regarding JFK are grand, i.e., they collapse under their own weight. People act as if there is the Official Government version and then the Independent Conspiracy versions. Really what you have is a very well studied case, and a few woo-woos out there that anomaly hunt and deal in pseudoscience/intellectual dishonesty. There is really no reason to believe that anything surprising will be revealed about the JFK case. But then, to the true believer, anyone who disagrees with them is in on the conspiracy or a dupe. At least the honest skeptic hears evidence, is usually pretty impartial, and applies the scientific method.
Parent makes it sound like illegals has this bountiful existence with grins on their face wider than the Chesire cat's due to the knowledge they are ripping off Americans.
Illegals work pretty damn hard. For some reason I'm reminded of how plantation owners would call their slaves lazy as they were riding around on a horse cracking the whip.
A lot of these people live pretty desperate lives, and we forget sometimes that they are actually people. What about kids who came illegally? There's actually a decent number of undocumented youths in the education system, including some of the more prestiges universities (such as UCLA). They have so much more to contend with than your typical suburban jackass that the sheer arrogance expressed by some of the backseat economists disgusts me.
Your assessment, in typical fashion, ignores an essential fact of budgeting. It's not an all or nothing game. Yes, we have pressing issues at home, but it's not always easy or cogent to redirect funds and people. By your logic, why don't we devote most scientific research to curing cancer and other debilitating ailments? Maybe because not every scientist is interested in these things?
Or another example might be the woefully ignorant college student who knows nothing about bond measures asking why they don't stop constructing buildings on the campus and instead spend that money to hire more professors. That's not the way things work, plain and simple, and in the long run, it's good things don't work like that.
A lot of folk, most likely lay-people, don't recognize perhaps the MOST important aspect of any scientific pursuit: innovation and inspiration. Science gets useful results because it's such an awesome tool. However, science really is just another form of entertainment. Let me give you an example from my own field. The mathematician G. H. Hardy worked extensively on the theory of numbers. He was a pure mathematician, and relished in the fact that his pursuit would never be put to use by humans. Look how wrong he was.
Saying, "Well gee what purpose does this or that have, let's cut it because it is not practical" is a position only taken out of ignorance or by the serious hard-liner. By this reasoning, we should fund almost none of the pure mathematics, and yet most of pure mathematics gets applied somewhere down the line. Usually to the great benefit of mankind.
Pretty soon all that NASA money will go to fun Creationist museums.
You grossly underestimate both the problems encountered in such missions and humanity's ingenuity. Unless you have robots that possess the reasoning of humans, said robots can never achieve a fraction of what a team of humans could do.
There are some situations where you shouldn't disregard a person based on their age. This is especially true in mathematics which requires no emotional maturity. However, a child or adolescent can sometimes fail to recognize when they are plunging into woo-woo land. I suspect a lot of this has to do with a lack of refined respect on part of the youth for the giants who came before them. Look at those who extol modern pseudoscience and you will see two types: frauds and people who think like a child.
Almost every other intellectual activity, outside of the natural sciences, requires wisdom and social tact, which youths rarely possess. Even within the natural sciences youths rarely have the critical thinking skills necessary to do legit science. Skepticism and the scientific method either have to be discovered by the youth on their own (extremely rare) or taught. There is huge correlation between people who can think skeptically and scientifically and those who hold Ph.Ds in the sciences.
The thing is, that 11 year old is getting valuable leadership and teaching experience.
Erm, no. First, the situations you encounter in a fantasy MMORPG rarely have bearing on real life unless you attend a lot of conventions for the clinically weird or Furries.
Second, an MMORPG has few of the social ramifications that real interactions do. Your inhibitions are incredibly low because of this, and this translates to interacting in ways that you might possibly never do in real life. It at best gives you an outlet (like imagining what you'd do to the guy who stole your girlfriend), but I'd wager that simply imagining yourself in a leadership role provides you with more experience than playing a game.
I can see how he might gain some teaching experience, but this also is modest. The concepts in even heavily technical table-top games are elementary. Explaining an easily understood concept requires much less skill on part of the teacher than a difficult idea.
Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, a.k.a NAMBLA, have recently announced a voice chat client that you can customize to make everyone sound like 11-year old boys.
Many European countries have fantastic public transit systems. In Switzerland, for example, you can get to most any major hiking trail-head via train and bus. Considering some of these trailheads are out in the boondocks and not too far from the summit, I find this impressive.
Sure, there is such a thing as "blind faith," and it is not particularly endorsed by many religious people with a strong history of study in their faith. For example, Jesus promoted a rigor of discovery modeled after "ask, seek, knock," indicating active participation and questioning by the believer. Of course, many other religions such as Buddhism have similar tenets of discovery and journey.
Religious apologists love to use this argument because if you lump together other "beliefs" in with their faith it somehow lends credibility to why they believe in some of the nutty things they do. It is in fact the entire goal of Creationism and its derivatives.
The truth of the matter, fortunately, is entirely different. There is little that we know about the empirical world which we have to take on "faith." Faith, in fact, requires that you set aside one of the basic principals of knowledge-gathering: the ability to repeatedly point out a phenomenon to casual observer with sufficient training. Now, religious apologists also love to attack this one by the classic argument styled something like, "Oh yeah?! Well, anyone with sufficient faith can clearly see what I'm talking about!" It's kind of sad, but that pretty much amounts to the strongest argument the religious apologist has in their arsenal.
The problem, of course, is that their observations and evidence are exactly the types of non-evidence that we throw out in more legitimate pursuits of knowledge. The reason being that the human brain is really not that reliable. The average person has a ton of false memories, and there is some correlation with how old the memory is/how sure you are of it being precise and how much the real event deviates from your memory. The human brain is great at matching patterns where there are none and projecting cultural beliefs onto outside phenomenon (just see the different guises that "night terrors" take).
If you know anything about pseudoscience, you quickly realize that religion follows its dictums exactly. They are in fact, one in the same, since much of pseudoscience provides the same comforts that a religion does, and some pseudosciences can be as all encompassing a world-view as a religion (i.e., things like "naturalism").
The "faith" of the scientist and the intellectually honest knowledge seeker is not a faith at all, but it's a reasonable trust of your fellow human being. Theoretically you could fact check everything, but you trust your colleagues who say they have checked a fact to actually have checked it, or in the case of mathematics, proved it. In essence, you are not required to have any preconceived beliefs nor any emotional attachment to the subject you are studying. This is the second, and another important, delimiter between faith and reasonable trust. Those intellectual honest knowledge seekers aren't starting with any particular premise in mind, whereas the faithful have to search for evidence after already making a conclusion, and most importantly, they have to search within.
That and douchebag ideas like this make it so that consumers pay more for their product. Most of the cost of auto insurance is not because of risk of accident or liability, but the risk of fraud.
;).
You have proof of this where? Go look at how insurance rates are calculated based on costs of various accidents and their associated probabilities and you'll see that "most" of the price has nothing to do with fraud. Ya'll sound like a bunch of yesmen tools, if you ask me
One important (even priceless) posession is that of cultural heritage and living tradition.
This is always brought up, implying that human tradition is so sacrosanct. Subsistence hunting is one thing, but many traditions and heritages are steeped in ridiculous mysticism, bigotry, and pseudoscience.
I mean, I know that I wholeheartedly support movements that seek to stop equality for the sexes, because it's so important to my culture to treat women like shit. Or how about those traditions of imperialism, wanton slaughter of natives, poisoning the environment.
The greater whole of humanity and the environment should always trump any cultural tradition. The real reason small indigenous groups can continue their subsistence hunting is because their impact is negligible.
Talking about culture as if it is some static thing is ridiculous in of itself. Culture changes as science progresses and social revolutions occur. Once the majority of whites realized that colored people weren't a bunch of savage slightly intelligent monkeys, most of them woke up and started treating them with some modicum of dignity. The only "culture" true to humans is that we adapt and change. Everything else is aesthetics (the clothes we wear, art we fashion, things we pray to, dreams we have).
How can you say that? Aren't you afraid someone will think you aren't "tough"?
The average individual shares your view, but there are a few brutes out there who can be pretty belligerent.