Sounds great in theory, but in practice memes have greater clout because of a marketing phenomenon known as "social proof". Basically, a meme is more likely to be reacted to positively than a new piece of data because people feel that "everyone's doing it".
Also, they help people feel like they're in a special group that understands the joke, which makes them more accepting of the idea because humans are very tribal -- when I say "move zig for great justice", it establishes me as part of the nerd tribe, sort of like a secret handshake.
Besides, I create original content. It doesn't do very well. Did you know that the world's supply of nuclear and renewable electricity generation would barely be able to support 3 industries in a post-oil universe? I do. Did you know that since the release of Doom, violent crime in the US has dropped by 50%? I do. Did you know that since 1900, the Republicans have increased inflation adjusted spending three times as much as the Democrats and increased inflation adjusted debt ten times as much? I do. These things are factual investigations outside of the mindscape of the nerd tribe as it exists today, so they're ignored so tried and true arguments can be presented instead.
By your standard, nobody on the internet or on TV can prove your theory. Obama will have to come to your house and show you the piece of paper.
In my view, after this evidence has been presented, the burden of proof falls on you. You're making an extraordinary claim, that there's a nation-wide conspiracy to place a foreigner in the president's office. Given that evidence has been presented showing Obama is a natural born citizen, do you have any evidence that he isn't?
Yes, and I'm fully against the president being in league with the space aliens from Jupiter. That's TREASON, and we should put the president to DEATH for being in league with the space aliens from Jupiter.
It's basically just a hope for a huge deus ex machina to let "their team" win. "Yay! Obama didn't really win because he's not really a US citizen!"
The problem is, despite pressing the law for their deus ex machina, they don't know shit about the law.
In the case that something happens to the president, the vice president takes power. This happened when Kennedy was assassinated, and it happened when Nixon was impeached. If something were to happen to the vice president, the speaker of the house takes power -- Nancy Pelosi. This deus ex would basically have to be, by far, the biggest scandal in the history of American politics for the Republicans to get someone in the presidency.
Yeah, fucking newborn Obama. I hate that fucker. He's trying to hide it, but I know full well he had laser eye beams and a giant spider mech for crushing his political enemies. He's like the bizzaro genius baby. He was all out the womb like "Dude, why'd I get expatriated?". Then he crushed all opposition.
But I'm not Yakov Smirnoff. I'm not even Russian! I'm just some jackoff on the Internet who thinks he's clever because he read a wikipedia article once!
Damnit man, don't ask me to actually remember all this stuff! My brain is already filled with bases which belong to us, while someone is in said base killing my doodz! I'll forget who is chargin' his lazer if you ask me to remember all the details!
Yes, I agree. Eliminating a major revenue stream for organized crime would be horrible. Also, creating a new industry and thousands of jobs is a major negative.
I suggest we bring back alcohol prohibition. I think having old-style gangsters and speakeasys would be neato.
Listen, you have nothing to worry about regarding the witch hunt.
We're just going to set you on fire, and if you use your devil magic to extinguish the flames, we'll know you're a witch. If you're consumed in a horrific and torturous death, we'll know you're a good Christian and we'll let you be buried in the church graveyard.
That always bothers me. I don't care what state I'm in, I can't recite the alphabet backwards on demand. I'd get about 3 letters in and realise I'm lost. "Just a minute while I sing the alphabet song and write it down."
You should use the term "plant-based tetrahydrocannabinol feedstock" instead.
Unless you're high, in which case you'll get lost somewhere in the middle because you noticed that dude, when we die? We like.... we.... we end up trapped in our own minds...so....like......you need to be able to live with yourself before you die... or you'll be in hell, but if you're happy with your life... you'll be in heaven......
Philosophy, before it became pure masturbation in the intellectual realm, was once proto-science as well as intellectual masturbation, leading to plenty of factually incorrect conclusions.
Are you prepared to defend the idea that all matter is composed of 4 elements?
It's always safer to read philosophical works(even modern ones) as anthropological artefacts rather than as serious works of logic or reason.
At the base of all philosophy is a gut feeling, with lots of flowery language to make it pretty and marketable. That's why so much of it is factually incorrect(Or do people really reverse-forget things?).
Unfortunately, when you're talking about getting more than half the country to vote for you, you're always going to have people who you'd rather not deal with following you.
Every candidate has the voters they'd rather pretend don't exist.
Frankly, I think after 8 years of "You gonna get raped" from Darth Vader, it makes sense that some people are clinging for dear life onto the positive and hopeful message Obama presents.
I don't think Keynesian economics are sane, so his promises are hollow to me, but I can understand why people who still think the government can spend a country into prosperity are cult-like excited about Obama.
Racism tends to be a one-sided injustice, while sexism is more insidious.
Sexism, for example, stereotypes both men and women, and in positive and negative ways.
Father's rights groups have popped up in many countries because of the ingrained sexist attitudes in many legal systems which say any women is better than any man at being a parent. Men who are accused of abuse or rape or stalking are treated differently in the legal system(and society) than women who are accused of abuse or rape or stalking. On the other hand, they're given more credit as to being strong, capable, and stable.
At the same time, women have to deal with the many and varied "girls can't/shouldn't do that" myths regarding life choices, and also bear unusual burdens regarding sex(Though I suspect some of those are self-inflicted). At the same time, they're given more credit in a number of areas (think of the last 'incompetent dad needs omniscient mom to help deal with common life problems' ad you saw)
Ironically, you looked my point straight in the eye when you said it yourself: "If your mother's choices did not reduce the decisions to their essences then she did not comprehend the appropriate concepts. A computer's user interface is an abstraction on top of it's hardware. Many people new to computers do not grasp that the concepts within the interface reduce back to the physical hardware and correspond to it's various states." -- EXACTLY. Her 'A or B' view of the world has completely discounted the idea of 'C, D, E, F, or some combination of them'. She's chosen the oversimplified version of what can be considered, and no other options exist.
The article itself points to this phenomena. "So the setup is 'snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems' vs. 'rebuttal I probably don't have time to read, let alone analyze closely.'".
We're not talking about some ideal of philosophy where a Zen philosopher can reduce all problems to their essence and from there find simple, elegant, and correct solutions. We're talking about pop philosophy where the most marketable solutions are the most popular, and the more complex, but more correct solutions aren't even part of the discourse.
As we can see, in this case the oversimplification is used to create the illusion that there are only two choices: Always accept presented dichotomies as axiomatic, or always get lost in pointless detail like an 18th century philosopher. This isn't the case.
When I was a computer tech, The only person I ever had issues helping was my mother. She'd read every thing she saw and she'd try to force me to make a choice about everything she saw, and the choices she gave were always the obvious ones (OK or cancel?). In reality, the path isn't always A or B. Her oversimplification of decisions didn't reduce the decisions to their essence, they made the decisions complicated by forcing a false dichotomy. I'm not clicking on A: or C:, I'm clicking on the tools menu. I'm not clicking "ok" or "cancel", I'm asking if she's got the disk in the drive.
Given the old false dichotomy "This statement is false", you can get caught up in whether the statement is true or false, but the oversimplification makes the answer infinitely complicated. By letting up just a little -- not so much that you start down the path of philosophical masturbation and questioning if you can even prove you exist, but enough that you can see the obvious -- the answer becomes clear: The statement is nonsense, neither true nor false.
The problem is always that we're presented a boolean decision for a complex, multi-variable problem. Are you for or against? Are you on our side or their side? Even if you try to present a more complicated argument, people will still bring you down to the level of "for/against".
In reality, we don't do things this way. I almost never make decisions by completely rejecting the options I don't take. Good opinions are more nuanced than that. Even if I need to make a choice, often I'll make it with caveats. I bought a car recently, but I there's a lot of reasons I like trucks and SUVs too.
In this world of pop philosophy, you can only have one opinion, and it has to be absolute and filled with contradictions. There's never a third option. Even if you have a third point of view, you'll be pidgeonholed into established viewpoints
A good counter-example, a lot of Ron Paul supporters during the election had Obama as their second choice. Dogmatic people would consider it a contradiction. "YOU CHOOSE EITHER DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN!", but his supporters had a different point of view entirely.
You know what would help competing against Google?
A good search engine.
Maybe Microsoft can take all that money they spend rebranding their useless shitty search engine every 2 years and build a good search engine? I don't care what they're calling MSN Messenger this week, it's a great product and I keep using it despite the constant name changes. Similarly, I don't care what they call Live Search or Bing or MSN Search or whatever they want to call it this week, it's shit and it's going to remain shit until they fix it.
I've always avoided Live search and its predecessors because they're fucking useless.
I was wondering if they'd made this new search engine less fucking useless. Obviously they haven't.
It's a shame they didn't learn anything with the Vista debacle -- it doesn't matter how much you spend on marketing if your product is shit. It's still shit, and unless you're selling to farmers who actually want to buy shit, you're not going to sell your shit to anyone.
Sir, I don't say this often. You are a complete fucking moron. What you've written is literally the opposite of reality.
Windows ME was by far the least stable version of the Windows 9x line. The problems people had with ME were never about resource usage, and always about the fact that it was ridiculously unstable, and Microsoft decided to hide DOS, making it more difficult to repair compared to previous versions of 9x. All of this is well-documented.
Windows 98SE was the best of the 9x line. ME was garbage, and everyone who actually had to deal with it knew how unstable and unreliable it was. Where were you?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds great in theory, but in practice memes have greater clout because of a marketing phenomenon known as "social proof". Basically, a meme is more likely to be reacted to positively than a new piece of data because people feel that "everyone's doing it".
Also, they help people feel like they're in a special group that understands the joke, which makes them more accepting of the idea because humans are very tribal -- when I say "move zig for great justice", it establishes me as part of the nerd tribe, sort of like a secret handshake.
Besides, I create original content. It doesn't do very well. Did you know that the world's supply of nuclear and renewable electricity generation would barely be able to support 3 industries in a post-oil universe? I do. Did you know that since the release of Doom, violent crime in the US has dropped by 50%? I do. Did you know that since 1900, the Republicans have increased inflation adjusted spending three times as much as the Democrats and increased inflation adjusted debt ten times as much? I do. These things are factual investigations outside of the mindscape of the nerd tribe as it exists today, so they're ignored so tried and true arguments can be presented instead.
By your standard, nobody on the internet or on TV can prove your theory. Obama will have to come to your house and show you the piece of paper.
In my view, after this evidence has been presented, the burden of proof falls on you. You're making an extraordinary claim, that there's a nation-wide conspiracy to place a foreigner in the president's office. Given that evidence has been presented showing Obama is a natural born citizen, do you have any evidence that he isn't?
Yes, and I'm fully against the president being in league with the space aliens from Jupiter. That's TREASON, and we should put the president to DEATH for being in league with the space aliens from Jupiter.
As I mentioned earlier, here's Obama's birth certificate. He was born in Honolulu. I know Hawaii is a freak state that doesn't count, but he's still American on a technicality of Hawaii being a state.
Also, Barack Obama's birth certificate.
It's not taboo, it's just retarded.
It's basically just a hope for a huge deus ex machina to let "their team" win. "Yay! Obama didn't really win because he's not really a US citizen!"
The problem is, despite pressing the law for their deus ex machina, they don't know shit about the law.
In the case that something happens to the president, the vice president takes power. This happened when Kennedy was assassinated, and it happened when Nixon was impeached. If something were to happen to the vice president, the speaker of the house takes power -- Nancy Pelosi. This deus ex would basically have to be, by far, the biggest scandal in the history of American politics for the Republicans to get someone in the presidency.
Yeah, fucking newborn Obama. I hate that fucker. He's trying to hide it, but I know full well he had laser eye beams and a giant spider mech for crushing his political enemies. He's like the bizzaro genius baby. He was all out the womb like "Dude, why'd I get expatriated?". Then he crushed all opposition.
But I'm not Yakov Smirnoff. I'm not even Russian! I'm just some jackoff on the Internet who thinks he's clever because he read a wikipedia article once!
Damnit man, don't ask me to actually remember all this stuff! My brain is already filled with bases which belong to us, while someone is in said base killing my doodz! I'll forget who is chargin' his lazer if you ask me to remember all the details!
Yes, I agree. Eliminating a major revenue stream for organized crime would be horrible. Also, creating a new industry and thousands of jobs is a major negative.
I suggest we bring back alcohol prohibition. I think having old-style gangsters and speakeasys would be neato.
Listen, you have nothing to worry about regarding the witch hunt.
We're just going to set you on fire, and if you use your devil magic to extinguish the flames, we'll know you're a witch. If you're consumed in a horrific and torturous death, we'll know you're a good Christian and we'll let you be buried in the church graveyard.
That always bothers me. I don't care what state I'm in, I can't recite the alphabet backwards on demand. I'd get about 3 letters in and realise I'm lost. "Just a minute while I sing the alphabet song and write it down."
Marijuana sounds vaguely spanish.
You should use the term "plant-based tetrahydrocannabinol feedstock" instead.
Unless you're high, in which case you'll get lost somewhere in the middle because you noticed that dude, when we die? We like.... we.... we end up trapped in our own minds...so....like......you need to be able to live with yourself before you die... or you'll be in hell, but if you're happy with your life... you'll be in heaven......
Dude, that's deep. What was I talking about?
In America, you can always find an Internet Czar. In Soviet Russia, the Internet Czar can always find YOU.
Your understanding of history is flawed.
Philosophy, before it became pure masturbation in the intellectual realm, was once proto-science as well as intellectual masturbation, leading to plenty of factually incorrect conclusions.
Are you prepared to defend the idea that all matter is composed of 4 elements?
It's always safer to read philosophical works(even modern ones) as anthropological artefacts rather than as serious works of logic or reason.
At the base of all philosophy is a gut feeling, with lots of flowery language to make it pretty and marketable. That's why so much of it is factually incorrect(Or do people really reverse-forget things?).
Unfortunately, when you're talking about getting more than half the country to vote for you, you're always going to have people who you'd rather not deal with following you.
Every candidate has the voters they'd rather pretend don't exist.
Frankly, I think after 8 years of "You gonna get raped" from Darth Vader, it makes sense that some people are clinging for dear life onto the positive and hopeful message Obama presents.
I don't think Keynesian economics are sane, so his promises are hollow to me, but I can understand why people who still think the government can spend a country into prosperity are cult-like excited about Obama.
Racism tends to be a one-sided injustice, while sexism is more insidious.
Sexism, for example, stereotypes both men and women, and in positive and negative ways.
Father's rights groups have popped up in many countries because of the ingrained sexist attitudes in many legal systems which say any women is better than any man at being a parent. Men who are accused of abuse or rape or stalking are treated differently in the legal system(and society) than women who are accused of abuse or rape or stalking. On the other hand, they're given more credit as to being strong, capable, and stable.
At the same time, women have to deal with the many and varied "girls can't/shouldn't do that" myths regarding life choices, and also bear unusual burdens regarding sex(Though I suspect some of those are self-inflicted). At the same time, they're given more credit in a number of areas (think of the last 'incompetent dad needs omniscient mom to help deal with common life problems' ad you saw)
Ironically, you looked my point straight in the eye when you said it yourself: "If your mother's choices did not reduce the decisions to their essences then she did not comprehend the appropriate concepts. A computer's user interface is an abstraction on top of it's hardware. Many people new to computers do not grasp that the concepts within the interface reduce back to the physical hardware and correspond to it's various states." -- EXACTLY. Her 'A or B' view of the world has completely discounted the idea of 'C, D, E, F, or some combination of them'. She's chosen the oversimplified version of what can be considered, and no other options exist.
The article itself points to this phenomena. "So the setup is 'snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems' vs. 'rebuttal I probably don't have time to read, let alone analyze closely.'".
We're not talking about some ideal of philosophy where a Zen philosopher can reduce all problems to their essence and from there find simple, elegant, and correct solutions. We're talking about pop philosophy where the most marketable solutions are the most popular, and the more complex, but more correct solutions aren't even part of the discourse.
Thanks for illustrating my point.
As we can see, in this case the oversimplification is used to create the illusion that there are only two choices: Always accept presented dichotomies as axiomatic, or always get lost in pointless detail like an 18th century philosopher. This isn't the case.
When I was a computer tech, The only person I ever had issues helping was my mother. She'd read every thing she saw and she'd try to force me to make a choice about everything she saw, and the choices she gave were always the obvious ones (OK or cancel?). In reality, the path isn't always A or B. Her oversimplification of decisions didn't reduce the decisions to their essence, they made the decisions complicated by forcing a false dichotomy. I'm not clicking on A: or C:, I'm clicking on the tools menu. I'm not clicking "ok" or "cancel", I'm asking if she's got the disk in the drive.
Given the old false dichotomy "This statement is false", you can get caught up in whether the statement is true or false, but the oversimplification makes the answer infinitely complicated. By letting up just a little -- not so much that you start down the path of philosophical masturbation and questioning if you can even prove you exist, but enough that you can see the obvious -- the answer becomes clear: The statement is nonsense, neither true nor false.
The problem is always that we're presented a boolean decision for a complex, multi-variable problem. Are you for or against? Are you on our side or their side? Even if you try to present a more complicated argument, people will still bring you down to the level of "for/against".
In reality, we don't do things this way. I almost never make decisions by completely rejecting the options I don't take. Good opinions are more nuanced than that. Even if I need to make a choice, often I'll make it with caveats. I bought a car recently, but I there's a lot of reasons I like trucks and SUVs too.
In this world of pop philosophy, you can only have one opinion, and it has to be absolute and filled with contradictions. There's never a third option. Even if you have a third point of view, you'll be pidgeonholed into established viewpoints
A good counter-example, a lot of Ron Paul supporters during the election had Obama as their second choice. Dogmatic people would consider it a contradiction. "YOU CHOOSE EITHER DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN!", but his supporters had a different point of view entirely.
You know what would help competing against Google?
A good search engine.
Maybe Microsoft can take all that money they spend rebranding their useless shitty search engine every 2 years and build a good search engine? I don't care what they're calling MSN Messenger this week, it's a great product and I keep using it despite the constant name changes. Similarly, I don't care what they call Live Search or Bing or MSN Search or whatever they want to call it this week, it's shit and it's going to remain shit until they fix it.
Hey, thanks.
I've always avoided Live search and its predecessors because they're fucking useless.
I was wondering if they'd made this new search engine less fucking useless. Obviously they haven't.
It's a shame they didn't learn anything with the Vista debacle -- it doesn't matter how much you spend on marketing if your product is shit. It's still shit, and unless you're selling to farmers who actually want to buy shit, you're not going to sell your shit to anyone.
Don't blame him. Everyone knows kittens control the media, this is just part of their raggamuffian propaganda campaign.
I hear Emo ninja freaked out and killed himself because someone dropped a spoon.
Caldera's case, I'm afraid, isn't the squeaky clean piece of anti-microsoft rhetoric it used to be.
Caldera changed their name to SCO and we all know how that worked out.
Except ME was a decent OS.
Sir, I don't say this often. You are a complete fucking moron. What you've written is literally the opposite of reality.
Windows ME was by far the least stable version of the Windows 9x line. The problems people had with ME were never about resource usage, and always about the fact that it was ridiculously unstable, and Microsoft decided to hide DOS, making it more difficult to repair compared to previous versions of 9x. All of this is well-documented.
Windows 98SE was the best of the 9x line. ME was garbage, and everyone who actually had to deal with it knew how unstable and unreliable it was. Where were you?