Oh okay you were talking purely about marriage, and I thought of it as starting a family.
No, I agree with you, I can't think of a reason to get married unless you want kids (unless you have religious proscriptions against extramarital sex, which I'm assuming you do not). I think the purpose of marriage is providing a commitment and basis for starting a family to raise children. If you're not doing that, why bother? There's no value to the arrangement for you.
And by that I mean the cultural institution of marriage. The reason you get a certificate from the state and a legal status is to make it easier for the state to arbitrate your divorce. Otherwise when you show up in court the first thing you do is claim your marriage wasn't valid (age, drunk, coerced, married to somebody else already, etc). So to short circuit that process the state makes you present yourself to the county clerk before you're "married" to prove you're of age, sober, not already married, etc. This is why when you get a marriage license they give you a 30 page booklet with one page about how to get married and 29 pages about how to get divorced.
If you're not having kids for whom you want custody and you're worried she'll take your shit if she leaves, there's no reason to want the state involved. She wants the state involved, absolutely, because the rules are written in her favor. But you don't.
That said I think it's a dying civilization that structures itself legally and culturally to make marriage and family unattractive to so many young people. Western civilization will either have an awakening and a rebirth and make significant, painful changes, or it will die.
Why do you need a rational argument? Life isn't rational. Choose to have kids. Choose to not have kids. Choose between flying a kite or riding a bike. None of it's rational.
If you want young men to want to have kids you raise them up to value family. That's how I was brought up, in a stable home with a loving family that values family, community, nation and God. That made me want to have those same things as an adult. If a young man was not brought up in such an environment and shown how pleasant that life is, there's not much I can do to "rationally" persuade him to want a life he's never known.
I guess the best I can do is this: when I was in my late twenties and my wife and I hadn't started our family yet because we were enjoying being young and free and the thought of the being tied down and swimming in poop was unappealing I asked my father, "Dad, how did you know when it was time to have kids?" And he told me "Son, there is no convenient time when you say 'everything is perfect now, let's mess it all up by having children.' It's going to be a rough few years when they're little, but I knew that I would be unhappy if I grew old and had no family in my life to care for and be cared for by. So we bit the bullet and did it and made the best of it."
It took us a few more years because of fertility issues but once we worked that out (wife needed injections to prevent spontaneous abortions) our kids are great. You don't mind the annoyance because they're incredibly cute (that's how evolution prevents you from strangling them), they love you, and eventually they are lots of fun. I built a RetroPie for my 4-year-old son for Christmas and we've been playing games all weekend. He loves Castlevania, TMNT IV on the SNES, Golden Axe and Double Dragon. We're having a great time.
So I guess that's one other rational argument for having kids: it gives you somebody to play video games with.
You're confusing physics with meta-physics and moral plays that explain human nature. Religion is extremely useful for instructing people on how to live, deal with others, raise a family, and make peace with the chaos of existence. Without that basis people's sense of right and wrong is just whatever the TV says this week, which is how we wind up with insane leftists who think a four year old boy who "wants" to wear a dress should have his dick cut off and be pumped full of hormones. Eventually people wake up (some of them, anyway), realize they're miserable cunts and think "there's got to be a better way" and find religion. It's happened over and over again through history, Reformations, Awakenings, revivals...it really has nothing to do with "science." Also remember the average IQ is 100 and half of people are dumber than that so if you think the UPS man and the guy making your sandwich at Subway are suddenly going to become Richard Dawkins you're nuts.
Now, in this particular situation, Carrier was not given taxes paid by other people, right? This wasn't a situation like a city paying to build a stadium for a sports team, where the taxes come from others, and are essentially given to the corporation. Carrier was just allowed to keep their own money, by not having to pay certain taxes.
Do you think those taxes belonged to the state? I'm just trying to figure out how you claim Carrier got "bribed with tax money."
The problem was when man decided to organize that concept and abuse it as a method of Control over the masses, justifying warfare and abuse against fellow man.
The masses will be controlled one way or the other. They can be controlled in productive, healthy ways that reinforce good behavior and community bonds by religious teaching. Or they can be controlled by the messaging generated by multinational corporations and programmed into their brains by television and pop culture. Drink, fuck, spend, buy buy buy. Or they can be forced by the state. But "control" isn't going away any time soon.
An end to religion will not bring any end to warfare. The US has been perpetually at war for 200 years and none of them have been holy crusades against the non-believers.
Also, right now the expansionist, violent, oppressive religion that keeps growing in size is Islam. You're little tirades against "religion" are not going to have any impact on the muslims. Their system of life (or Control, as you say) is working pretty damn well. Move in, out breed, rape, terrorize, kill anybody who steps out of line. What are you going to do to push back against that? Secular humanism ain't shit against Allah.
As for "abusing fellow man," again, without religion, culture, nation, race...something to create group bond, identity and loyalty, then you're just an economic unit, which is the most abusable thing there is.
People's minds demand a religion. A force that rewards the just and punishes the wicked. You remove God and people don't become anarcho capitalists and abide by the Non-Aggression Principle. They replace religious morality with myths about racial/gender/sexual equality and God with the power of the state, the Code of Student Conduct and the Human Resources Department to punish those who speak heresy. There is no end to "abuse against fellow man" without religion. It just takes a different form, with different inane reasoning, and excoriates for different sins.
It's also hard to forgo the irony regarding Patriotism when speaking about a country that was built with a slave race on land taken from the Natives.
So what would you have done? You show up on the boat, see the natives, say "well shit, there's some fuckers in loin cloths on the beach, guess the place is full let's fuck off back to Europe?" Fuck off with your moralizing shit. Lots of people in early America were adamantly against slavery. About the only people who liked it were the Cavaliers. And nobody alive today in America ever owned a slave. People love their country and fuck you for trying to make them feel ashamed of it. Pretty sure you aren't perfect either.
The end result of the hate your country, religion is bad, patriotism is bad, blah blah blah leftist bullshit is a dead culture, a slave race that will absolutely be supplanted by any other group that exhibits any sort of in-group preference. "We are Chinese, we like being Chinese, fuck the round-eyes this is our century." "We are Muslim, we like being Muslim, fuck the infidels, Europe will be ours."
Keep shitting on any westerner who wants any sort of religious, national, or cultural bond with other westerners. That'll keep western civilization going. That's the "life worth living" your society has created.
Yeah, I just really don't like Francis so I threw in a dig.
The Church has survived 2,000 years and isn't going to die now.
Faith is cyclical in history. It's been waning and will eventually wax again. There are movements in the Church underway already that have a Trump/Brexit feeling to them. Those who want to "Make Catholicism Great Again." The next Pope will not be kissing muslim feet.
I didn't only blame the men. As you said, it's also the women's behavior.
Basically I think feminists/progressives in the culture wrecked the sexual market by fighting against religion, chastity, virtue, "slut shaming," monogamy, etc, and then men adapted. Men want sex. When the only way to get regular sex without incurring harsh penalties from society was marriage, men got married. This meant focusing on long-term value: stability, career, respectable social status, family, etc. Now the best way to get regular sex is to focus on short-term value: physical attractiveness, clothing, spending cash, and enough knowledge of female psychology to get a dumb girl who bought into the hedonistic lifestyle into bed.
That is the society we have now. Fixing it requires massive cultural changes. You basically have to have a culture pushback. "The sexual revolution was a mistake." Will people realize that and talk about it and work it into enough movie plots and sitcoms to make a difference? I don't know. They either will or this culture will die and be replaced by another, successful culture. And I say that not as an alarmist, just a matter of fact: a culture that doesn't produce children to perpetuate itself dies. And directionless hedonists don't generally have kids.
If you had to make the argument to a 20-something male who didn't want kids why they should want to get married, what would you even say?
That would depend a lot on the young man. I know how I'm bringing up my kids, and I think they'll do okay. But we're traditionalist Catholics, so the things I'm saying to them about the nature of life, humanity, reality and our duties and responsibilities to God, civilization and family won't apply to most.
Okay. Well how do we get the desirable (or at least fixable) members of society to form stable families and produce children to perpetuate our civilization? Because right now they're not.
Not being able to get a date is not quite the same as "dropping out of the relationship game".
It's kind of related, but not just about not being able to get dates, as the sexual market place is also being fucked up by men who have no problem getting dates, particularly with the whole tinder/hookup culture thing. The top 20% of men are banging all the women (because why settle for an average guy when you just want to hook up?) and those men have no incentive to settle down because they're swimming in fresh poon. And those women aren't going to settle for an average guy because they all think they're worthy of one of the top 20% guys they've been banging...when there wouldn't be enough of those to go around even if those guys wanted to get married. Then those women hit 30 and all of a sudden those hot guys start swiping left on them, and the bottom 80% of guys who were desperate for their attention 5 or 10 years ago are bitter and have given up on the whole thing.
The statistics on marriage, dating and children all look miserable for Millennials. And it's not just economic...it's largely cultural, as poor as dirt people have been falling in love and getting married since the invention of dirt. I have no idea what the answer is for them, but I'm glad to be a Gen Xer married since before all this hook-up culture stuff started. It looks soul-crushing, and I don't know what exactly society does when people stop getting married and having kids. I think your society just dies.
No major development is possible because the talent that put the system together has been sacrificed - so the company fails to respond to new challenges and does not innovate. Unless the enterprise's business is completely unchanging, it's a slow glide path to oblivion - but the ground is just as hard for all that.
At which point Capgemini will sell them high-priced consulting services for their new IT infrastructure.
Were the eight years of predator drone bombing not enough? Was the ten plus years of warrant-less spying not enough? Was the endless war not enough? Keep in mind everything that is happening now, is happening under the Obama administration.
The anti-war crowd only cares when it's a Republican in office. Dems were all set to nuke Russia because Podesta can't identify a phishing email.
Also, expect to see a return of stories in the news media about the homeless. The homeless always seem to vanish whenever a Democrat is in office, then pop right back up when a Republican wins.
Even with all that, nope, still no excuse for death threats or other hateful messages.
I would never engage in such activity, but I roll my eyes whenever I hear about internet death threats, particularly over video games
1. Having a death threat against you doesn't mean you're right.
2. Saying you have a death threat against you doesn't mean I believe you.
3. If.0001% of the daily death threats screamed over Xbox Live from some n00b who just got noscoped were carried out the streets would be knee deep in blood.
So when Wu and her ilk say they're scared for their lives because of internet death threats, they're either lying (because absolutely no one believes there's any real danger) or they're beyond stupid. They don't seem stupid to me. That leaves the other thing.
It used to, but then we killed religion, culture, nation and family. You can't have public religious displays anymore because it might offend "someone." So religion leaves public life and there goes a point of connection between people. Multiculturalism insists we can't force people to assimilate to our own culture when they come here (or just tell them to fuck off, we're full to begin with), so now our neighborhoods are pocketed with people who don't speak our language, share our traditions and quite often don't really give a shit about us anyway as they're just economic migrants here for the money. Maybe nice people, but not our people. Now "patriotism is racism" and the multinationals want open borders so they can more easily shuffle around low wage workers. Feminism, no-fault divorce and the family court system killed the desire of both young men and women to get married and start families.
What are you with no family, nation, religion, race or culture? Just another economic unit on an accounting sheet. Insist instead that family, nation, religion, race and culture matter and the news media calls you a nazi, though. Good people don't care about anything except money.
For instance, are they equivalent before the law? Well, in civilized countries that would be a "yes". Are there equal numbers of each? No. Do they have equal wealth? No.
But those aren't the politically tricky questions. Ask "are blacks, whites, and asians on average equally intelligent?" Only western leftists will be forced to say (and maybe even believe) "yes." The AI, looking at the scientific literature, or with an understanding of evolutionary biology, will say "no." The politically correct answer is false, and the truth is unspeakable in the western media or polite company. Leftist heads will then assplode.
And what happens when you try to sell that AI around the world? Remember, only western leftists believe in racial equality. Nobody else does because the concept is factually wrong and it isn't part of anyone else's ideology. There's no political or societal capital to be gained lying about racial biological equivalence in, say, Chinese or Korean society. What happens when a Japanese person asks "is the average Japanese person smarter than the average Australian aboriginal?" Is the robot supposed to lie and say "NO OF COURSE NOT THEY ARE THE SAME ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE IS AN EVIL RACIST." What use have the Japanese for an AI that spouts western politically correct "answers" to simple questions?
There's a difference between opinions and facts that are objectively false though.
But an awful lot of politically correct "facts" are objectively false. What do you think Huffington Post will do when the AI explains that women don't get 77 cents on the dollar for the same job a man does? Pretty sure they're not going to say "gee, that's actually a bullshit statistic we've been peddling, we'll stop now." Pretty sure they're going to demand Google "fix" the program and make it spout feminist propaganda for them.
Also, is it google's place to provide equal weight to people who advocate violence especially when they are gaming the algorithm?
"Advocating violence" shouldn't be disqualifying. The colonists advocated for violence to free themselves from the British. Lots of people including Jews advocated for US involvement in WWII before Pearl Harbor. Is the algorithm going to suppress newspaper editorials urging the US to intervene in the next humanitarian crisis?
Also I don't think they're gaming the algorithm. The article says a search engine expert thinks they are...and links to an article wherein the author gives no evidence or even really advocates for the position that someone is gaming the search results. Instead he explains varying ways the anti-denialists are trying to game the search results to knock the denialist site off the top rank. I don't see any evidence the denialist site ranking was not obtained organically. If it were "gamed," then wouldn't google just work to eliminate whatever type of gaming it did? That's the whole point of Google's algorithm secrets, to squash people who try to game the system, which is why things that worked once (long, long ago) like link farms or spamming links in blog comments no longer do anything for you.
It's likely the denialist site gets ranked higher because there's more interest in conspiracy theories than in boring history. Go to youtube and search "moon landing." You get the moon landing footage...and then pages and pages of "MOON LANDING HOAX!" videos. I don't think anyone's gaming the system to push moon landing hoax conspiracies. Just it takes one video to show the moon landing, and dozens and dozens to "explain" why it was "fake." Lies are more complicated than truth. It takes eyeballs to see there are two genders (and a few genetic anomalies). It takes years and years of mental gymnastics and gender studies journals to convince yourself being a transgenderfluiddragonkin is a perfectly natural and healthy gender identity you were totally born with.
But just searching "moon landing" gives you the moon landing footage...and then pages and pages of "moon landing hoax" videos. An 8 year old who searches youtube for "moon landing" is going to get the impression that the moon landing was fake. I know because I did this when I wanted to show my 4 year old footage of the moon landing on youtube.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh okay you were talking purely about marriage, and I thought of it as starting a family.
No, I agree with you, I can't think of a reason to get married unless you want kids (unless you have religious proscriptions against extramarital sex, which I'm assuming you do not). I think the purpose of marriage is providing a commitment and basis for starting a family to raise children. If you're not doing that, why bother? There's no value to the arrangement for you.
And by that I mean the cultural institution of marriage. The reason you get a certificate from the state and a legal status is to make it easier for the state to arbitrate your divorce. Otherwise when you show up in court the first thing you do is claim your marriage wasn't valid (age, drunk, coerced, married to somebody else already, etc). So to short circuit that process the state makes you present yourself to the county clerk before you're "married" to prove you're of age, sober, not already married, etc. This is why when you get a marriage license they give you a 30 page booklet with one page about how to get married and 29 pages about how to get divorced.
If you're not having kids for whom you want custody and you're worried she'll take your shit if she leaves, there's no reason to want the state involved. She wants the state involved, absolutely, because the rules are written in her favor. But you don't.
That said I think it's a dying civilization that structures itself legally and culturally to make marriage and family unattractive to so many young people. Western civilization will either have an awakening and a rebirth and make significant, painful changes, or it will die.
Why do you need a rational argument? Life isn't rational. Choose to have kids. Choose to not have kids. Choose between flying a kite or riding a bike. None of it's rational.
If you want young men to want to have kids you raise them up to value family. That's how I was brought up, in a stable home with a loving family that values family, community, nation and God. That made me want to have those same things as an adult. If a young man was not brought up in such an environment and shown how pleasant that life is, there's not much I can do to "rationally" persuade him to want a life he's never known.
I guess the best I can do is this: when I was in my late twenties and my wife and I hadn't started our family yet because we were enjoying being young and free and the thought of the being tied down and swimming in poop was unappealing I asked my father, "Dad, how did you know when it was time to have kids?" And he told me "Son, there is no convenient time when you say 'everything is perfect now, let's mess it all up by having children.' It's going to be a rough few years when they're little, but I knew that I would be unhappy if I grew old and had no family in my life to care for and be cared for by. So we bit the bullet and did it and made the best of it."
It took us a few more years because of fertility issues but once we worked that out (wife needed injections to prevent spontaneous abortions) our kids are great. You don't mind the annoyance because they're incredibly cute (that's how evolution prevents you from strangling them), they love you, and eventually they are lots of fun. I built a RetroPie for my 4-year-old son for Christmas and we've been playing games all weekend. He loves Castlevania, TMNT IV on the SNES, Golden Axe and Double Dragon. We're having a great time.
So I guess that's one other rational argument for having kids: it gives you somebody to play video games with.
You're confusing physics with meta-physics and moral plays that explain human nature. Religion is extremely useful for instructing people on how to live, deal with others, raise a family, and make peace with the chaos of existence. Without that basis people's sense of right and wrong is just whatever the TV says this week, which is how we wind up with insane leftists who think a four year old boy who "wants" to wear a dress should have his dick cut off and be pumped full of hormones. Eventually people wake up (some of them, anyway), realize they're miserable cunts and think "there's got to be a better way" and find religion. It's happened over and over again through history, Reformations, Awakenings, revivals...it really has nothing to do with "science." Also remember the average IQ is 100 and half of people are dumber than that so if you think the UPS man and the guy making your sandwich at Subway are suddenly going to become Richard Dawkins you're nuts.
We are nowhere near the end of religion.
All humans are hypocrites.
Now, in this particular situation, Carrier was not given taxes paid by other people, right? This wasn't a situation like a city paying to build a stadium for a sports team, where the taxes come from others, and are essentially given to the corporation. Carrier was just allowed to keep their own money, by not having to pay certain taxes.
Do you think those taxes belonged to the state? I'm just trying to figure out how you claim Carrier got "bribed with tax money."
The problem was when man decided to organize that concept and abuse it as a method of Control over the masses, justifying warfare and abuse against fellow man.
The masses will be controlled one way or the other. They can be controlled in productive, healthy ways that reinforce good behavior and community bonds by religious teaching. Or they can be controlled by the messaging generated by multinational corporations and programmed into their brains by television and pop culture. Drink, fuck, spend, buy buy buy. Or they can be forced by the state. But "control" isn't going away any time soon.
An end to religion will not bring any end to warfare. The US has been perpetually at war for 200 years and none of them have been holy crusades against the non-believers.
Also, right now the expansionist, violent, oppressive religion that keeps growing in size is Islam. You're little tirades against "religion" are not going to have any impact on the muslims. Their system of life (or Control, as you say) is working pretty damn well. Move in, out breed, rape, terrorize, kill anybody who steps out of line. What are you going to do to push back against that? Secular humanism ain't shit against Allah.
As for "abusing fellow man," again, without religion, culture, nation, race...something to create group bond, identity and loyalty, then you're just an economic unit, which is the most abusable thing there is.
People's minds demand a religion. A force that rewards the just and punishes the wicked. You remove God and people don't become anarcho capitalists and abide by the Non-Aggression Principle. They replace religious morality with myths about racial/gender/sexual equality and God with the power of the state, the Code of Student Conduct and the Human Resources Department to punish those who speak heresy. There is no end to "abuse against fellow man" without religion. It just takes a different form, with different inane reasoning, and excoriates for different sins.
It's also hard to forgo the irony regarding Patriotism when speaking about a country that was built with a slave race on land taken from the Natives.
So what would you have done? You show up on the boat, see the natives, say "well shit, there's some fuckers in loin cloths on the beach, guess the place is full let's fuck off back to Europe?" Fuck off with your moralizing shit. Lots of people in early America were adamantly against slavery. About the only people who liked it were the Cavaliers. And nobody alive today in America ever owned a slave. People love their country and fuck you for trying to make them feel ashamed of it. Pretty sure you aren't perfect either.
The end result of the hate your country, religion is bad, patriotism is bad, blah blah blah leftist bullshit is a dead culture, a slave race that will absolutely be supplanted by any other group that exhibits any sort of in-group preference. "We are Chinese, we like being Chinese, fuck the round-eyes this is our century." "We are Muslim, we like being Muslim, fuck the infidels, Europe will be ours."
Keep shitting on any westerner who wants any sort of religious, national, or cultural bond with other westerners. That'll keep western civilization going. That's the "life worth living" your society has created.
Yeah, I just really don't like Francis so I threw in a dig.
The Church has survived 2,000 years and isn't going to die now.
Faith is cyclical in history. It's been waning and will eventually wax again. There are movements in the Church underway already that have a Trump/Brexit feeling to them. Those who want to "Make Catholicism Great Again." The next Pope will not be kissing muslim feet.
Yes, Francis has been a disaster, but they'll come back. I have faith ;)
I didn't only blame the men. As you said, it's also the women's behavior.
Basically I think feminists/progressives in the culture wrecked the sexual market by fighting against religion, chastity, virtue, "slut shaming," monogamy, etc, and then men adapted. Men want sex. When the only way to get regular sex without incurring harsh penalties from society was marriage, men got married. This meant focusing on long-term value: stability, career, respectable social status, family, etc. Now the best way to get regular sex is to focus on short-term value: physical attractiveness, clothing, spending cash, and enough knowledge of female psychology to get a dumb girl who bought into the hedonistic lifestyle into bed.
That is the society we have now. Fixing it requires massive cultural changes. You basically have to have a culture pushback. "The sexual revolution was a mistake." Will people realize that and talk about it and work it into enough movie plots and sitcoms to make a difference? I don't know. They either will or this culture will die and be replaced by another, successful culture. And I say that not as an alarmist, just a matter of fact: a culture that doesn't produce children to perpetuate itself dies. And directionless hedonists don't generally have kids.
If you had to make the argument to a 20-something male who didn't want kids why they should want to get married, what would you even say?
That would depend a lot on the young man. I know how I'm bringing up my kids, and I think they'll do okay. But we're traditionalist Catholics, so the things I'm saying to them about the nature of life, humanity, reality and our duties and responsibilities to God, civilization and family won't apply to most.
Same with the nu-males and feminists, I guess. I'm a conservative Catholic. People like me, the mormons, etc, are still breeding in good numbers.
Okay. Well how do we get the desirable (or at least fixable) members of society to form stable families and produce children to perpetuate our civilization? Because right now they're not.
May as well write about marriage between toasters and humans.
I am so goddamn sick of you toasterphobic troglodytes.
suffrage
Boy that's the scary one, huh? What happens when you can just build more voters?
Not being able to get a date is not quite the same as "dropping out of the relationship game".
It's kind of related, but not just about not being able to get dates, as the sexual market place is also being fucked up by men who have no problem getting dates, particularly with the whole tinder/hookup culture thing. The top 20% of men are banging all the women (because why settle for an average guy when you just want to hook up?) and those men have no incentive to settle down because they're swimming in fresh poon. And those women aren't going to settle for an average guy because they all think they're worthy of one of the top 20% guys they've been banging...when there wouldn't be enough of those to go around even if those guys wanted to get married. Then those women hit 30 and all of a sudden those hot guys start swiping left on them, and the bottom 80% of guys who were desperate for their attention 5 or 10 years ago are bitter and have given up on the whole thing.
The statistics on marriage, dating and children all look miserable for Millennials. And it's not just economic...it's largely cultural, as poor as dirt people have been falling in love and getting married since the invention of dirt. I have no idea what the answer is for them, but I'm glad to be a Gen Xer married since before all this hook-up culture stuff started. It looks soul-crushing, and I don't know what exactly society does when people stop getting married and having kids. I think your society just dies.
God dangit you damn liberals it's Adam and Eve or Steve not Adam and SEXBOT4000!!!!!!!!
Well I really liked your story up until the end. Hope you find something soon man.
No major development is possible because the talent that put the system together has been sacrificed - so the company fails to respond to new challenges and does not innovate. Unless the enterprise's business is completely unchanging, it's a slow glide path to oblivion - but the ground is just as hard for all that.
At which point Capgemini will sell them high-priced consulting services for their new IT infrastructure.
Hey, the scam might work if Trump wants to try to play the same game with EVERY company that can be bribed with a bit of tax money.
Who got bribed with tax money? I thought Carrier was allowed to keep their own money as incentive.
Were the eight years of predator drone bombing not enough? Was the ten plus years of warrant-less spying not enough? Was the endless war not enough? Keep in mind everything that is happening now, is happening under the Obama administration.
The anti-war crowd only cares when it's a Republican in office. Dems were all set to nuke Russia because Podesta can't identify a phishing email.
Also, expect to see a return of stories in the news media about the homeless. The homeless always seem to vanish whenever a Democrat is in office, then pop right back up when a Republican wins.
Even with all that, nope, still no excuse for death threats or other hateful messages.
I would never engage in such activity, but I roll my eyes whenever I hear about internet death threats, particularly over video games
1. Having a death threat against you doesn't mean you're right.
2. Saying you have a death threat against you doesn't mean I believe you.
3. If .0001% of the daily death threats screamed over Xbox Live from some n00b who just got noscoped were carried out the streets would be knee deep in blood.
So when Wu and her ilk say they're scared for their lives because of internet death threats, they're either lying (because absolutely no one believes there's any real danger) or they're beyond stupid. They don't seem stupid to me. That leaves the other thing.
Has society created a life worth living?
It used to, but then we killed religion, culture, nation and family. You can't have public religious displays anymore because it might offend "someone." So religion leaves public life and there goes a point of connection between people. Multiculturalism insists we can't force people to assimilate to our own culture when they come here (or just tell them to fuck off, we're full to begin with), so now our neighborhoods are pocketed with people who don't speak our language, share our traditions and quite often don't really give a shit about us anyway as they're just economic migrants here for the money. Maybe nice people, but not our people. Now "patriotism is racism" and the multinationals want open borders so they can more easily shuffle around low wage workers. Feminism, no-fault divorce and the family court system killed the desire of both young men and women to get married and start families.
What are you with no family, nation, religion, race or culture? Just another economic unit on an accounting sheet. Insist instead that family, nation, religion, race and culture matter and the news media calls you a nazi, though. Good people don't care about anything except money.
Are you lonely? If not, then this article has nothing to do with you.
For instance, are they equivalent before the law? Well, in civilized countries that would be a "yes". Are there equal numbers of each? No. Do they have equal wealth? No.
But those aren't the politically tricky questions. Ask "are blacks, whites, and asians on average equally intelligent?" Only western leftists will be forced to say (and maybe even believe) "yes." The AI, looking at the scientific literature, or with an understanding of evolutionary biology, will say "no." The politically correct answer is false, and the truth is unspeakable in the western media or polite company. Leftist heads will then assplode.
And what happens when you try to sell that AI around the world? Remember, only western leftists believe in racial equality. Nobody else does because the concept is factually wrong and it isn't part of anyone else's ideology. There's no political or societal capital to be gained lying about racial biological equivalence in, say, Chinese or Korean society. What happens when a Japanese person asks "is the average Japanese person smarter than the average Australian aboriginal?" Is the robot supposed to lie and say "NO OF COURSE NOT THEY ARE THE SAME ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE IS AN EVIL RACIST." What use have the Japanese for an AI that spouts western politically correct "answers" to simple questions?
There's a difference between opinions and facts that are objectively false though.
But an awful lot of politically correct "facts" are objectively false. What do you think Huffington Post will do when the AI explains that women don't get 77 cents on the dollar for the same job a man does? Pretty sure they're not going to say "gee, that's actually a bullshit statistic we've been peddling, we'll stop now." Pretty sure they're going to demand Google "fix" the program and make it spout feminist propaganda for them.
Also, is it google's place to provide equal weight to people who advocate violence especially when they are gaming the algorithm?
"Advocating violence" shouldn't be disqualifying. The colonists advocated for violence to free themselves from the British. Lots of people including Jews advocated for US involvement in WWII before Pearl Harbor. Is the algorithm going to suppress newspaper editorials urging the US to intervene in the next humanitarian crisis?
Also I don't think they're gaming the algorithm. The article says a search engine expert thinks they are...and links to an article wherein the author gives no evidence or even really advocates for the position that someone is gaming the search results. Instead he explains varying ways the anti-denialists are trying to game the search results to knock the denialist site off the top rank. I don't see any evidence the denialist site ranking was not obtained organically. If it were "gamed," then wouldn't google just work to eliminate whatever type of gaming it did? That's the whole point of Google's algorithm secrets, to squash people who try to game the system, which is why things that worked once (long, long ago) like link farms or spamming links in blog comments no longer do anything for you.
It's likely the denialist site gets ranked higher because there's more interest in conspiracy theories than in boring history. Go to youtube and search "moon landing." You get the moon landing footage...and then pages and pages of "MOON LANDING HOAX!" videos. I don't think anyone's gaming the system to push moon landing hoax conspiracies. Just it takes one video to show the moon landing, and dozens and dozens to "explain" why it was "fake." Lies are more complicated than truth. It takes eyeballs to see there are two genders (and a few genetic anomalies). It takes years and years of mental gymnastics and gender studies journals to convince yourself being a transgenderfluiddragonkin is a perfectly natural and healthy gender identity you were totally born with.
But just searching "moon landing" gives you the moon landing footage...and then pages and pages of "moon landing hoax" videos. An 8 year old who searches youtube for "moon landing" is going to get the impression that the moon landing was fake. I know because I did this when I wanted to show my 4 year old footage of the moon landing on youtube.
The Republicans suppress their nutjobs. The lunatic fringe of the Democratic party, though, is the Democratic party.