Just had a chat with my girlfriend about this. --She related to me, (before I mentioned this post, btw), a story about how she'd once been on a student council during university.
She said everybody on it was basically insane and broken. Her position was a very minor arts thing, but because of the position, she was included in a cross-country conference of student-council members from many universities. What she described were people who wanted to get into real politics after school; one guy who was being very careful about the kinds of pictures taken of himself in case stuff came back to bite him, but who did some lunatic things. (One of his things was getting drunk and pounding on her door for 45 minutes yelling at the top of his lungs for some girl who didn't live there. The next day, when she wrote a note on the door saying, "that girl doesn't live here", he scrawled obscenities all over her door.) --Anyway, the thing which struck her was that the lunatics were not isolated to her one school, but seemed to represent a universal condition with the same patterns from all over. --Essentially, charismatic but deeply broken people with no moral groundings and extremely poor self-control. She described some pretty disgusting things. Rape. Drinking until kids were vomiting blood. Crazy sex. (In one meeting with the previous student council, the old guard were saying, "Yeah, this conference is great! You're going to have a lot of fun!" It turned into a gleeful comparing of notes; "Who here has had sex with a married man?" People raised their hands and laughed. "Who here has had unprotected sex?" Raised hands, more gleeful laughter. Psychopaths get off on self-destructive behavior; it's built into their being. They need to wallow in the muck in order to feed some aspect of their mechanism.) --So the conference was an orgy of crudeness, sexual harassment, drug abuse and massive egos. The kind of thing which sounds like fiction but isn't. And this is the student council population; the ones who are supposedly more responsible than the rest of us, who seek command and control positions.
These are the people who will rule our cities and corporations and our military. There's a reason our world is so totally messed up right now.
Around 6% of the population have broken brains, according to some of the estimates I've looked at, and they seek out power, so they bottle-neck in those kinds of environments. But this is the sort of thing positive action can be taken against. It's not hugging trees and it's not saving whales or protesting nuclear arms. It's doable and it makes sense on many levels. If you're a psychopath, you fail the test, lose your right to participate in business or public office and everybody finds out that you present a danger to society. Honestly; this is easy to solve. The difficult part is that many of the decision-makers and members of the media who have the power to push screening are going to by psychopaths themselves.
But it could still be done. It needs to be done. Until it is done, the world will not get better.
I don't care to waste time on the three endless debates being revisited here. (Well, sort of revisited. It's such an old and tired set of problems that nobody here is even giving a full effort). Capital punishment, nature v.s. nurture, and the morality of punishing a natural-born killer.
Don't care. None of that will be solved here or today.
What I AM interested in is the use of medical technology to detect psychopathy in people. We have the technology right now. I want to see a reliable and open system of testing introduced so that we can filter people who are climbing power ladders. -We could have avoided the whole last ten years of bloodshed and economic ruin if we had a simple testing system in place for recognizing psychopaths. What we do with them after this is fodder for those endless debates, and that's fine. History will sort it out. I just think it would be nice if we stopped giving leadership roles to reptiles. You know, so we can stop living in a world where corruption and mass-murder are considered normal? That'd sure be nice.
I want to see this happen. I want to see this happen. I want to see this happen. It's my intention to live in a world where everybody wakes up.
-Not that we can't benefit from free thinkers. We'll just dramatically reduce the number of them available for all the important things our race needs to accomplish. And, I suppose, zombies need free thinkers to manipulate them, (since they're not much good for anything else), so Free Thought is not entirely redundant. But among cell phone users, it's pretty much a dead issue.
Oh, and if through your muddled thinking, you believe you are taking offense to this, don't worry. That's just the ego programming kicking in. Don't worry about it. You can't do anything about it anyway, except allow it to direct all of your behavior 24/7.
It's amazingly easy to manipulate the perpetually ignorant and dazed. Good thing I'm not evil. Too bad your masters are.
I'm completely lost on what relevance your psychopath reference has.
Suggesting that the people whose lives were washed away by the failed dyke system (which their government was entrusted with the maintenance of) are guilty of saddling society with an unfair debt load is a case of blaming the victim. Psychopaths routinely blame the victim, and governments are rife with psychopaths.
All these problems are PSYCHOLOGICAL, and can be fixed by thinking about things differently. What else do you think separates those who are happy, from those who are unhappy? Don't tell me - it's those damn 'chemicals in the brain', right? Moron. MORON.
Ah. So you're saying the mind is NOT governed by neural chemistry but rather by the spirit, is that it?
I'd like to see how well you could perform with all your serotonin receptors blocked for a week. Drugs work for a reason, and the reason is that brain chemistry matters. A lot. Heck, basic feelings like hunger and sex are driven entirely by discrete changes in brain chemistry. You can mind-over-matter such forces, but it's hardly an easy thing to do.
Yes, the soul does exist, but the brain and the spirit are designed to function in tandem. Brain chemistry is not there to be ignored. People are not "Morons" simply because they have to deal with such forces.
Wow. That's one of the most illuminating comments I've ever read here.
The government is the people. The people are ultimately responsible for the actions (or in this case, the non-actions) of the government.
Of course, this is no longer true, (if it ever was). The people have zero power; the government is a giant leach with no true oversight, and even if votes counted for anything, a significant portion of the population is too stupid and evil to be trusted to vote responsibly anyway. (A portion of the populace STILL believes that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11).
As an aside, maintaining a dyke is not terribly expensive. Building a stretch of highway has probably about the same cost. Cleaning up after a massive disaster is rather more expensive.
Also worthy of note. . . Psychopaths blame their victims. (So do other personality types, but it is one of the constant markers of the psycho.)
If the NSA wants to know EVERYTHING about you, they have far better ways than installing active spyware on your system to do it.
There is a record somewhere of everything you've ever downloaded or uploaded. Every Google search you've ever performed. Encryption breaking is pointless because they have the ability to know what you type as you type it. Heck, they probably have the ability to know what you think as you think it.
Did you know that you can read an RFID tag from orbit? --People know about the max distance a tag can be charged from, and it is indeed a few feet, but the distance from which it can be read is much greater. If the detector is good enough. . .
Did you know you can use a light bulb as an active antenna? Any bit of circuitry, for that matter, even powered down, still processes EM wave forms and can be used to snoop. The idea of the NSA messing around with malware in order to spy on computer users is like comparing Donkey Kong to today's modern game systems.
The only reason the NSA might encourage the belief that they have proprietary code built into a Microsoft product would be to mislead people into thinking that they work within the same baby-fences as the rest of us free range serfs.
The guy's name is Greenbaum and he wants to control what you say and think?
Well I guess that's appropriate.
I hate how stuff gets buried on Google. Type in "Greenbaum Speech" a week from now, and you'll get this idiot's blog and the issue of "Free Speech" coming up instead of this.
You locked that all down pretty quick when you figured out some of the rules of this particular engagement. Evidence of Ego = losing. Game theory. The problem is that I set the rules, which means you've already submitted to me by altering your behavior so that it fits with the acceptable "Win" pattern. --Which, of course, means I've already got the home advantage. More game theory.
And yes, this is ugly.
These scurrying bit of counter-productive idiocy, (which we ALL have inside us), don't go away. They hide and play games in the back-ends of our minds. I don't like it, and I'm betting you don't either. But where are we? What can be done? --The only effective countermeasure to automatic, predatory thinking is to stay vigilant and learn about the nature of the predator. When we accumulate enough knowledge and energy, we can begin to work towards true ownership of our minds. And then we can choose whether to be monsters or not.
The fact of the matter is this: --Pretty much everything you or I or anybody does is a pre-programmed response designed to increase effective feeding and power accumulation. It's a master stroke! It's self-imprisoning behavior. When the slaves are already trying to prevent the other slaves from growing strong, this becomes the primary mechanism in maintaining the state of universal bondage. The trick is recognizing our own internal predator. Most people have no idea. They hide behind the belief that they are giving, happy, smart people when really their primary actions, when examined, are not chosen from the top ends of our minds but rather are self-serving reactions to ego-based directives. Everybody is engaged in some form of game theory in virtually every interaction they have with the world. But this is an uncomfortable thing to consider, and so they pretend. Or they simply do not see. And so they are blind slaves.
Now science is a wonderful thing because, when practiced correctly, it bypasses many of the tools of the predator. But the predator is very clever; it is responsible for the knee-jerk, ego-wounded reactions we have to certain statements, (Such as, "Most people I know who champion so-called "science" over religion are victims of that hypnosis. They wouldn't recognize real critical thinking if they tripped over it, but they truly believe they are critical thinkers. And THAT is how the dream of the matrix works to control people."), which in turn blossom into entire behavior sets which we believe are based on our personal choices, but which are instead based on these auto-reactions.
Faux science uses the authority of real science to manipulate people by creating convincing lies; it can create society-wide fear. In the case of this Swine Flu thing, it creates fear of plague. And then it can then be used to make us feel safe and secure when we alter our behavior in the manner in which it tells us = "Win". (In the Swine Flu example, winning = getting a shot.) By contrast, real science asks, "What are ALL the factors involved and who ultimately benefits from the resulting patterns?"
It's all game theory, and a frightened populace is not able to think clearly in order to come out on top of that game. Knowing practitioners of Game theory know that inspiring fear in one's prey = advantage.
People attack that which they feel assaults their self-importance. "Most people I know who champion [false] science over religion are victims of that hypnosis". Your ego took offense to the thought that it is hypnotized and so it sent a strong reaction up through your nervous system and you acted upon that by responding to me as you did. And you behaved as though this idiotic reaction was coming from the real you. It wasn't. That's the predator at work. Our predators are the enemy.
>Do you allow the fear of ridicule from the authority figures you respect to dictate what you think about and explore?
No, not really. Which authority figures would these be?
Please elaborate so we can do a better job tearing your argument to pieces.
Are you suggesting that everybody who claims to be an unbiased critical thinker is actually an unbiased critical thinker?
Here's a fairly basic question for you:
Would an unbiased critical thinker who already KNOWS he doesn't have enough information, automatically ASSUME that this unknown quantity (the information you are requesting), will allow the performance of the rather emotionally-driven action of, "tearing [an] argument to pieces"?
What kind of "science" are you referring to?
Had your Swine Flu shot yet?
Is your argument that people who think themselves critical thinkers are gobbling up the same kind of fear as the religious, and simple reverting to a different kind of religion you term "science"?
More or less, Yes. Do you allow the fear of ridicule from the authority figures you respect to dictate what you think about and explore?
Just because you happen not to have fallen for this particular piece of idiocy doesn't mean that half of you don't believe in the Swine Flu, or the Evil Terrorists, or the Free Market, or whatever your chosen flavor of gullible happens to be.
Culled between so-called, "Science" (as opposed to the real thing), and religion, there remain precious few rational thinkers in the world.
SO don't be so quick to judge. If everybody who believes in a stupid lie were to be struck dead right now, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through this forum. I remember when virtually everybody here once believed in WMD's with a salivating kind of vigor.
In any case. . , the 2012 thing IS a myth, but just the date. Our world is right now on the cusp of a mass extinction and everybody knows it. The lie is in the fixed date. That's a distraction to confuse people with idiotic debate while the elites scurry to pack their tunnels with food and supplies.
The above poster "If we remove the irrational fears" that would include any form of God.
Religion is sold to people in much the same way as any state-driven fear; it just looks slightly different and so it gets categorized in a different box. But that box is in the same basement.
This is why television is best avoided. It's not the adverts which get you; it's the implied reality behind the statements, and the endless flicker, flicker, flicker just on the edge of our awareness, lulling us into mass hypnosis. Most people I know who champion so-called "science" over religion are victims of that hypnosis. They wouldn't recognize real critical thinking if they tripped over it, but they truly believe they are critical thinkers. And THAT is how the dream of the matrix works to control people.
I had $25 left in a bank account for a couple of years. The bank ate it all up with service charges until the balance went negative and then when I didn't pay the bill they closed out the account and said I was lucky they didn't come after me.
Fuck the banks. I can't wait for the economy to totally crash and for all the monkey men and monkey women in suits to flip out and destroy themselves. Sure, I'll probably die myself, but I'm going to go laughing while pointing out that I told them so.
(Nah. I'll probably be a chump and provide comfort like I always seem to do in person. I just wish people would grow a few extra brain cells and get a clue or two so I won't be the only one not flipping out when the whole thing goes to shit. That Swine Flu idiocy was a great indicator of what you can expect from the populace, and that was threat-level "kindergarten". The people you think are smart but who fell for the H1N1 mind game are exactly the people who are going to totally lose their fucking minds when the sky actually falls. Total liabilities.)
And five years from now, they'll be dusty leftovers found in plastic bins at the local electronics surplus shop. If you can even find them.
Ten years from now, people will hold them up and squint at them and wonder what they were originally built to do. Computer cards all look the same. The only notable thing about these ones is that they don't have any ports on the back. After a couple seconds of interest, they'll get tossed back into the bin.
No real point to this post, other than the "gosh" factor. It just still amazes me how quickly consumer tech ripens and rots.
The people who are vulnerable to this come in three flavors. . .
1. The hackers, which I imagine is a very small percentage
2. Those who experience courage and curiosity. --That is, those who are not frightened to experience life and the dangers and joys which exist beyond slavery. Some people, (like you apparently), seek out charismatic authority figures and follow their commands regardless of the logic behind those commands, so that they can feel "safe" and secure, (probably because they don't trust their own decision-making abilities). Apple is certainly very charismatic and they are good at providing a feeling of safety.
3. The followers. When enough people do something, the followers follow. And they probably don't know enough to change their passwords.
Apple makes awesome gear. But their iPhone service is demonstrably lousy; it's lazy and negligent and it fails to take advantage of the full range of possibilities offered by their unique device. Thus, many average customers simply obeyed the FREE MARKET FORCES, (which people who seek authority figures tend to kneel before in an intense form of worship, partly because their charismatic asshat authority figures told them to do so), and followed the competition, in this case, the hacker community. The problem here is that the god of the Free Market happened to do something you didn't feel comfortable with this time around.
But it's okay to be a puppy. If you want Apple's guiding hand to make you feel safe, then that's fine. But the truth of the matter is that some people are going to want to explore beyond the playground. Hating them because they're braver than you makes you a puppy and it means you should probably stay right where you are for a while longer until you grow dissatisfied with life under the wing of a playground supervisor.
Yup. --And any reading of the bible shows us that if our actual "superiority" fails to conquer the opposing camp, then god will step in on our behalf and blast them from the heavens himself. You know, because, we're the "Chosen" people.
Religion is for fools and people with fractured minds.
Slashdot Mirror
Just had a chat with my girlfriend about this. --She related to me, (before I mentioned this post, btw), a story about how she'd once been on a student council during university.
She said everybody on it was basically insane and broken. Her position was a very minor arts thing, but because of the position, she was included in a cross-country conference of student-council members from many universities. What she described were people who wanted to get into real politics after school; one guy who was being very careful about the kinds of pictures taken of himself in case stuff came back to bite him, but who did some lunatic things. (One of his things was getting drunk and pounding on her door for 45 minutes yelling at the top of his lungs for some girl who didn't live there. The next day, when she wrote a note on the door saying, "that girl doesn't live here", he scrawled obscenities all over her door.) --Anyway, the thing which struck her was that the lunatics were not isolated to her one school, but seemed to represent a universal condition with the same patterns from all over. --Essentially, charismatic but deeply broken people with no moral groundings and extremely poor self-control. She described some pretty disgusting things. Rape. Drinking until kids were vomiting blood. Crazy sex. (In one meeting with the previous student council, the old guard were saying, "Yeah, this conference is great! You're going to have a lot of fun!" It turned into a gleeful comparing of notes; "Who here has had sex with a married man?" People raised their hands and laughed. "Who here has had unprotected sex?" Raised hands, more gleeful laughter. Psychopaths get off on self-destructive behavior; it's built into their being. They need to wallow in the muck in order to feed some aspect of their mechanism.) --So the conference was an orgy of crudeness, sexual harassment, drug abuse and massive egos. The kind of thing which sounds like fiction but isn't. And this is the student council population; the ones who are supposedly more responsible than the rest of us, who seek command and control positions.
These are the people who will rule our cities and corporations and our military. There's a reason our world is so totally messed up right now.
Around 6% of the population have broken brains, according to some of the estimates I've looked at, and they seek out power, so they bottle-neck in those kinds of environments. But this is the sort of thing positive action can be taken against. It's not hugging trees and it's not saving whales or protesting nuclear arms. It's doable and it makes sense on many levels. If you're a psychopath, you fail the test, lose your right to participate in business or public office and everybody finds out that you present a danger to society. Honestly; this is easy to solve. The difficult part is that many of the decision-makers and members of the media who have the power to push screening are going to by psychopaths themselves.
But it could still be done. It needs to be done. Until it is done, the world will not get better.
-FL
I don't care to waste time on the three endless debates being revisited here. (Well, sort of revisited. It's such an old and tired set of problems that nobody here is even giving a full effort). Capital punishment, nature v.s. nurture, and the morality of punishing a natural-born killer.
Don't care. None of that will be solved here or today.
What I AM interested in is the use of medical technology to detect psychopathy in people. We have the technology right now. I want to see a reliable and open system of testing introduced so that we can filter people who are climbing power ladders. -We could have avoided the whole last ten years of bloodshed and economic ruin if we had a simple testing system in place for recognizing psychopaths. What we do with them after this is fodder for those endless debates, and that's fine. History will sort it out. I just think it would be nice if we stopped giving leadership roles to reptiles. You know, so we can stop living in a world where corruption and mass-murder are considered normal? That'd sure be nice.
I want to see this happen. I want to see this happen. I want to see this happen. It's my intention to live in a world where everybody wakes up.
-FL
And we don't even have to man it! We can use clones and HALs with Kevin Spacey's voice.
-FL
That was a tough lesson in dream dispersal.
Did you read the comments on that dude's blog?
I'd have added some of my own, but I just didn't have the heart.
Ouch.
-FL
-Not that we can't benefit from free thinkers. We'll just dramatically reduce the number of them available for all the important things our race needs to accomplish. And, I suppose, zombies need free thinkers to manipulate them, (since they're not much good for anything else), so Free Thought is not entirely redundant. But among cell phone users, it's pretty much a dead issue.
Oh, and if through your muddled thinking, you believe you are taking offense to this, don't worry. That's just the ego programming kicking in. Don't worry about it. You can't do anything about it anyway, except allow it to direct all of your behavior 24/7.
It's amazingly easy to manipulate the perpetually ignorant and dazed. Good thing I'm not evil. Too bad your masters are.
-FL
I'm completely lost on what relevance your psychopath reference has.
Suggesting that the people whose lives were washed away by the failed dyke system (which their government was entrusted with the maintenance of) are guilty of saddling society with an unfair debt load is a case of blaming the victim. Psychopaths routinely blame the victim, and governments are rife with psychopaths.
Is that clear enough for you to get un-lost?
-FL
Nope.
Nuclear is old hat. But the society which holds that future tech is also holding the keys to our cage and doesn't want to share. Read Richard Dolan.
It is rare that I read a sci-fi novel as fantastic as the one we're currently living in the middle of but which most people are too scared to look at.
-FL
All these problems are PSYCHOLOGICAL, and can be fixed by thinking about things differently. What else do you think separates those who are happy, from those who are unhappy? Don't tell me - it's those damn 'chemicals in the brain', right? Moron. MORON.
Ah. So you're saying the mind is NOT governed by neural chemistry but rather by the spirit, is that it?
I'd like to see how well you could perform with all your serotonin receptors blocked for a week. Drugs work for a reason, and the reason is that brain chemistry matters. A lot. Heck, basic feelings like hunger and sex are driven entirely by discrete changes in brain chemistry. You can mind-over-matter such forces, but it's hardly an easy thing to do.
Yes, the soul does exist, but the brain and the spirit are designed to function in tandem. Brain chemistry is not there to be ignored. People are not "Morons" simply because they have to deal with such forces.
-FL
Wow. That's one of the most illuminating comments I've ever read here.
The government is the people. The people are ultimately responsible for the actions (or in this case, the non-actions) of the government.
Of course, this is no longer true, (if it ever was). The people have zero power; the government is a giant leach with no true oversight, and even if votes counted for anything, a significant portion of the population is too stupid and evil to be trusted to vote responsibly anyway. (A portion of the populace STILL believes that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11).
As an aside, maintaining a dyke is not terribly expensive. Building a stretch of highway has probably about the same cost. Cleaning up after a massive disaster is rather more expensive.
Also worthy of note. . . Psychopaths blame their victims. (So do other personality types, but it is one of the constant markers of the psycho.)
-FL
If the NSA wants to know EVERYTHING about you, they have far better ways than installing active spyware on your system to do it.
There is a record somewhere of everything you've ever downloaded or uploaded. Every Google search you've ever performed. Encryption breaking is pointless because they have the ability to know what you type as you type it. Heck, they probably have the ability to know what you think as you think it.
Did you know that you can read an RFID tag from orbit? --People know about the max distance a tag can be charged from, and it is indeed a few feet, but the distance from which it can be read is much greater. If the detector is good enough. . .
Did you know you can use a light bulb as an active antenna? Any bit of circuitry, for that matter, even powered down, still processes EM wave forms and can be used to snoop. The idea of the NSA messing around with malware in order to spy on computer users is like comparing Donkey Kong to today's modern game systems.
The only reason the NSA might encourage the belief that they have proprietary code built into a Microsoft product would be to mislead people into thinking that they work within the same baby-fences as the rest of us free range serfs.
-FL
The guy's name is Greenbaum and he wants to control what you say and think?
Well I guess that's appropriate.
I hate how stuff gets buried on Google. Type in "Greenbaum Speech" a week from now, and you'll get this idiot's blog and the issue of "Free Speech" coming up instead of this.
-FL
Ha ha!
You locked that all down pretty quick when you figured out some of the rules of this particular engagement. Evidence of Ego = losing. Game theory. The problem is that I set the rules, which means you've already submitted to me by altering your behavior so that it fits with the acceptable "Win" pattern. --Which, of course, means I've already got the home advantage. More game theory.
And yes, this is ugly.
These scurrying bit of counter-productive idiocy, (which we ALL have inside us), don't go away. They hide and play games in the back-ends of our minds. I don't like it, and I'm betting you don't either. But where are we? What can be done? --The only effective countermeasure to automatic, predatory thinking is to stay vigilant and learn about the nature of the predator. When we accumulate enough knowledge and energy, we can begin to work towards true ownership of our minds. And then we can choose whether to be monsters or not.
The fact of the matter is this: --Pretty much everything you or I or anybody does is a pre-programmed response designed to increase effective feeding and power accumulation. It's a master stroke! It's self-imprisoning behavior. When the slaves are already trying to prevent the other slaves from growing strong, this becomes the primary mechanism in maintaining the state of universal bondage. The trick is recognizing our own internal predator. Most people have no idea. They hide behind the belief that they are giving, happy, smart people when really their primary actions, when examined, are not chosen from the top ends of our minds but rather are self-serving reactions to ego-based directives. Everybody is engaged in some form of game theory in virtually every interaction they have with the world. But this is an uncomfortable thing to consider, and so they pretend. Or they simply do not see. And so they are blind slaves.
Now science is a wonderful thing because, when practiced correctly, it bypasses many of the tools of the predator. But the predator is very clever; it is responsible for the knee-jerk, ego-wounded reactions we have to certain statements, (Such as, "Most people I know who champion so-called "science" over religion are victims of that hypnosis. They wouldn't recognize real critical thinking if they tripped over it, but they truly believe they are critical thinkers. And THAT is how the dream of the matrix works to control people."), which in turn blossom into entire behavior sets which we believe are based on our personal choices, but which are instead based on these auto-reactions.
Faux science uses the authority of real science to manipulate people by creating convincing lies; it can create society-wide fear. In the case of this Swine Flu thing, it creates fear of plague. And then it can then be used to make us feel safe and secure when we alter our behavior in the manner in which it tells us = "Win". (In the Swine Flu example, winning = getting a shot.) By contrast, real science asks, "What are ALL the factors involved and who ultimately benefits from the resulting patterns?"
It's all game theory, and a frightened populace is not able to think clearly in order to come out on top of that game. Knowing practitioners of Game theory know that inspiring fear in one's prey = advantage.
People attack that which they feel assaults their self-importance. "Most people I know who champion [false] science over religion are victims of that hypnosis". Your ego took offense to the thought that it is hypnotized and so it sent a strong reaction up through your nervous system and you acted upon that by responding to me as you did. And you behaved as though this idiotic reaction was coming from the real you. It wasn't. That's the predator at work. Our predators are the enemy.
>Do you allow the fear of ridicule from the authority figures you respect to dictate what you think about and explore?
No, not really. Which authority figures would these be?
Yes, yes you do, o
Please elaborate so we can do a better job tearing your argument to pieces.
Are you suggesting that everybody who claims to be an unbiased critical thinker is actually an unbiased critical thinker?
Here's a fairly basic question for you:
Would an unbiased critical thinker who already KNOWS he doesn't have enough information, automatically ASSUME that this unknown quantity (the information you are requesting), will allow the performance of the rather emotionally-driven action of, "tearing [an] argument to pieces"?
What kind of "science" are you referring to?
Had your Swine Flu shot yet?
Is your argument that people who think themselves critical thinkers are gobbling up the same kind of fear as the religious, and simple reverting to a different kind of religion you term "science"?
More or less, Yes. Do you allow the fear of ridicule from the authority figures you respect to dictate what you think about and explore?
-FL
Just because you happen not to have fallen for this particular piece of idiocy doesn't mean that half of you don't believe in the Swine Flu, or the Evil Terrorists, or the Free Market, or whatever your chosen flavor of gullible happens to be.
Culled between so-called, "Science" (as opposed to the real thing), and religion, there remain precious few rational thinkers in the world.
SO don't be so quick to judge. If everybody who believes in a stupid lie were to be struck dead right now, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through this forum. I remember when virtually everybody here once believed in WMD's with a salivating kind of vigor.
In any case. . , the 2012 thing IS a myth, but just the date. Our world is right now on the cusp of a mass extinction and everybody knows it. The lie is in the fixed date. That's a distraction to confuse people with idiotic debate while the elites scurry to pack their tunnels with food and supplies.
-FL
The above poster "If we remove the irrational fears" that would include any form of God.
Religion is sold to people in much the same way as any state-driven fear; it just looks slightly different and so it gets categorized in a different box. But that box is in the same basement.
This is why television is best avoided. It's not the adverts which get you; it's the implied reality behind the statements, and the endless flicker, flicker, flicker just on the edge of our awareness, lulling us into mass hypnosis. Most people I know who champion so-called "science" over religion are victims of that hypnosis. They wouldn't recognize real critical thinking if they tripped over it, but they truly believe they are critical thinkers. And THAT is how the dream of the matrix works to control people.
-FL
Thank-you.
I wanted to say the same thing, except I'd have been exceptionally rude to everybody in the process.
-FL
A bunch of stupid apes running around using tools they barely understand.
Dude, you just described 95% of America, including yourself.
-FL
You can always appoint someone else (a trustee) to manage the portfolio for you.
Yes, leaving one's money in the hands of others always works out SO well. (Sarcasm) And that's when people are still alive!
-FL
I had $25 left in a bank account for a couple of years. The bank ate it all up with service charges until the balance went negative and then when I didn't pay the bill they closed out the account and said I was lucky they didn't come after me.
Fuck the banks. I can't wait for the economy to totally crash and for all the monkey men and monkey women in suits to flip out and destroy themselves. Sure, I'll probably die myself, but I'm going to go laughing while pointing out that I told them so.
(Nah. I'll probably be a chump and provide comfort like I always seem to do in person. I just wish people would grow a few extra brain cells and get a clue or two so I won't be the only one not flipping out when the whole thing goes to shit. That Swine Flu idiocy was a great indicator of what you can expect from the populace, and that was threat-level "kindergarten". The people you think are smart but who fell for the H1N1 mind game are exactly the people who are going to totally lose their fucking minds when the sky actually falls. Total liabilities.)
-FL
What? No talking apes? I paid for talking apes living in mud huts with rifles they have no industry capable of providing ammunition for!
Damn YOU! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
-FL
Yeah, but you'd have to be several degrees above "Carbonite" in order to properly manage your portfolio.
-FL
And five years from now, they'll be dusty leftovers found in plastic bins at the local electronics surplus shop. If you can even find them.
Ten years from now, people will hold them up and squint at them and wonder what they were originally built to do. Computer cards all look the same. The only notable thing about these ones is that they don't have any ports on the back. After a couple seconds of interest, they'll get tossed back into the bin.
No real point to this post, other than the "gosh" factor. It just still amazes me how quickly consumer tech ripens and rots.
-FL
Department of energy?
Mapping weather systems?
Cracking high bit encryption schemes? Listening to every phone call happening on the planet and mapping social patterns?
BORING!
No, I want to see a 100 million core supercomputer render one of those 3D "Mandelbulbs" and let me do some real-time exploring with a VR helmet.
Now THAT would be a worthy use for such resources!
That and being able to grow virtual beings from DNA samples.
-FL
The people who are vulnerable to this come in three flavors. . .
1. The hackers, which I imagine is a very small percentage
2. Those who experience courage and curiosity. --That is, those who are not frightened to experience life and the dangers and joys which exist beyond slavery. Some people, (like you apparently), seek out charismatic authority figures and follow their commands regardless of the logic behind those commands, so that they can feel "safe" and secure, (probably because they don't trust their own decision-making abilities). Apple is certainly very charismatic and they are good at providing a feeling of safety.
3. The followers. When enough people do something, the followers follow. And they probably don't know enough to change their passwords.
Apple makes awesome gear. But their iPhone service is demonstrably lousy; it's lazy and negligent and it fails to take advantage of the full range of possibilities offered by their unique device. Thus, many average customers simply obeyed the FREE MARKET FORCES, (which people who seek authority figures tend to kneel before in an intense form of worship, partly because their charismatic asshat authority figures told them to do so), and followed the competition, in this case, the hacker community. The problem here is that the god of the Free Market happened to do something you didn't feel comfortable with this time around.
But it's okay to be a puppy. If you want Apple's guiding hand to make you feel safe, then that's fine. But the truth of the matter is that some people are going to want to explore beyond the playground. Hating them because they're braver than you makes you a puppy and it means you should probably stay right where you are for a while longer until you grow dissatisfied with life under the wing of a playground supervisor.
-FL
Yup. --And any reading of the bible shows us that if our actual "superiority" fails to conquer the opposing camp, then god will step in on our behalf and blast them from the heavens himself. You know, because, we're the "Chosen" people.
Religion is for fools and people with fractured minds.
-FL