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Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
By the way, texpiper, fuck you.
Never go home, ever.
hugs for Tony
Sven
Has anyone mentioned recently that you are kinda an asshole?
Hating democracy goes well with that, alright.
chigau; no, but thanks for sharing.
Have a nice day.
Isn’t it funny how, for all his godbotting, the single most important of all of Jesus’ alleged instructions, the Golden Rule, is the one that the texpip thinks that following is a sign of being “weak”?
You were in two places at once without even knowing about it! If you had any memories, it would collapse the space-time continuum.*
words with two u’s never look they are spelled correctly
Chas
Bless your heart.
ffs…That should read never look like they are spelled correctly
Yep, they can’t think through what it really means, or Jebus must be communist or some sort of “radical”.
”But if you undermine people’s trust in the promise of future pensions…”
LykeX, the US is in debt to the tune of $17 trillion dollars, with at least a hundred trillion more in unfunded liabilities. There are going to be tens of millions of losers when the unintended consequences start shining. There is no money to cover the promises.
”The very concept of money relies on a promise to pay. It’s the promise of future payment that makes it money”
No, it is not. Money represents work done. Money can be devalued.
===
”The day that this happens is the day that democracy fails as a political system, and gets replaced by something else.”
I think so.
===
“These are just a small number of situations where , for empathetic people, the thoughts, opinions, needs and desires of others are recognized.”
I apologize Tony. I was not clear in the point I was trying to make. Let me try and explain. If you are raising kids, you should try and teach them kindness, generosity and lots of other qualities you should hope they will extend towards other people. What I was talking about is the flip side of the coin, teaching them resilience and how to deal with bullies, insults and people who want to control and manipulate.
And yet, “resilience” is not equivalent to “apathy”. Nor is it even equivalent to “Stoicism”.
I wonder if your main problem is your idiosyncratic; perhaps even narcissistic, approach to language and communication.
For example, do you really think that your ludicrous distortions of evolutionary biology are what biologists actually think? Or do you just not care that your ludicrous distortions are distortions?
txpiper:
I really hope you are not about to advocate for victims to fight back against bullies.
Thats one piece of ‘common wisdom’ that needs to be discarded wholesale. It may work a hxndful of times, but the vast majority of the time, it backfires.
But hey, I only spent three hours last night looking up facts about bullying. Curiously, none of the sources I read that performed or cited studies into bullying offered retaliation as an answer. One of the most common answers?
Adapt teaching materials to include discussions and activities aimed at respecting other people.
In other words, work to change the culture, rather than teach kids that violence is wrong, except for when it isn’t.
The idea that fighting back against a bully will cause them to back down seems to lack evidential support. It has anecdotal support, but those mean precious little.
Like many people, you have bought into toxic ideas concerning masculinity, such as ‘might makes right’ and ‘compassion=weakness’
It would appear that the texpip, ignorant as always, does not know that some forms of jade ARE white. And indeed the finest and most valued types of jade in China are the white ones.
Another pathetic, transparent lie by the texpip. Here is his whole original statement in its entirety.
It is clear from the context here that “teaching resilience and how to deal with bullies” has NOTHING to do with what the texpip originally said. It is in fact the opposite, about BEING a bully and not caring what your victims think.
Disgusting sociopathic liar is disgusting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_jade
And thus we see the texpip engaging in the most bog-standard form of bigotry of all, invoking a stereotype in utter rank ignorance, and doubling down on error when called on it, like the intellectually dishonest coward we all know him to be.
What you’re talking about is an argument for being careful about what promises you make now, not simply tossing out past promises. Very simply, ignoring the promises of the past will cause huge amounts of chaos because people are relying on those promises. People are making decisions now, based on the assumption that those promises will be kept.
I mentioned this is the last post, but you apparently decided not to respond to it. I think it’s important, so I’ll repeat it: People have worked hard their entire lives, accepting lower-than-market salaries because of a promise that when they got old, there’d be a pension waiting for them.
If you don’t give them the pension, they’ll starve. Assuming that you don’t substitute some other government program (which I suspect you wouldn’t want to do), they’ll literally starve. Honest, hard-working people; starving to death.
Are you OK with that? If not, what should we do about it?
Feel free to respond in something other than one-liners.
Bullcrap. Money can be devalued exactly because it’s tied to future promises. If money represented work done, then they’d have objective value. After all, past work done is an objective, settled quantity. It can be precisely measured and compared; it’s not up for dispute.
Promises, however, are of varying value. Their value is directly related to whether or not you keep them.
If we’re making a deal where you pay me some money for a service, then I don’t give a rat’s ass what work you did to earn the money you’re giving me. That’s completely irrelevant to me. What matters is this: How much will the guy down the street give me for this money?
The value of the money doesn’t come from your work. It comes from the promise of the guy down the street to respect the value of the cash. If he doesn’t accept it, then your money is worthless, no matter how hard you worked for it.
Money is all about what work people are willing to do in the future, not what they’ve done in the past.
@ txpiper
Errr….
txpiper, you better go back in time and explain to John Law Esq, the inventor of high fucking finance (on the future promise of The Mississippi Co.) why he, and everyone since, has got this completely wrong.
And contact the Fed pronto so that they stop Shazamming that money shit into existence out of nothing.
MagnetsMoney, how does it work?So what? What is your point? Or do you just spew out every inane thought that passes through your head?
@TheMellowMonkey, waaaaaay back at #331
Sorry I took ages to reply :-/
Just wanted to say thanks; that’s actually really helpful.
John Law as depicted by a cartoonist of the time.
The cat is complaining that if it weren’t being blown by the winds (hot,tepid and cold) , it might land on it’s feet.
The mice are turning money to dust: ” Powders for mice and rats, [money] lenders and moths.”
The whole shebang is just trading in wind: “Wind is the beginning and wind is the end. My pillow and my foundation…”
No mention of work anywhere. Money represents wind.
You can’t be serious. Not even you can be stupid enough to doubt that is what needs to happen.
Red herring. This isn’t about single parent households, but since you bring it up there is indeed something missing in any such household. No child has ever been born through asexual reproduction so there is no such thing as a child with only one parent.
No, not all adoptions are inferior as there are times when the biological parents die, or are unfit to care for the kids they have. In those cases, it is best to find adoptive parents to replace the biological ones so as to give the child as much stability and normalcy as possible. However, same sex nannies are not desirable because there is no balance between genders, and no homosexual will be a good role model for either gender, since they have a warped view of gender themselves.
Adoption exists to provide children with competent families, which consists of a mother and a father figure. It doesn’t exist to provide a commodity to those who wish to look legitimate while playing house.
It’s self-evident in the studies. It’s impossible to say that those children did better than they would have if raised in a normal family structure, because that comparison can’t be tested. There are decades of research that shows that kids suffer deficiencies when either parental role is not present. Your inability to see that shows that you have not adequately researched the issue and are just blowing smoke out your ass.
Crap, messed that up. Try again…
You can’t be serious. Not even you can be stupid enough to doubt that is what needs to happen.
Red herring. This isn’t about single parent households, but since you bring it up there is indeed something missing in any such household. No child has ever been born through asexual reproduction so there is no such thing as a child with only one parent.
No, not all adoptions are inferior as there are times when the biological parents die, or are unfit to care for the kids they have. In those cases, it is best to find adoptive parents to replace the biological ones so as to give the child as much stability and normalcy as possible. However, same sex nannies are not desirable because there is no balance between genders, and no homosexual will be a good role model for either gender, since they have a warped view of gender themselves.
Adoption exists to provide children with competent families, which consists of a mother and a father figure. It doesn’t exist to provide a commodity to those who wish to look legitimate while playing house.
It’s self-evident in the studies. It’s impossible to say that those children did better than they would have if raised in a normal family structure, because that comparison can’t be tested. There are decades of research that shows that kids suffer deficiencies when either parental role is not present. Your inability to see that shows that you have not adequately researched the issue and are just blowing smoke out your ass.
That’s what I’m saying, there is no way to do comparative analysis on kids who are different, being raised in different situations, then saying that one situation is just as good as the other. This is especially true when those on your side of the fence just hand waive any study that shows that kids raised in homes without both a mother and father figure fare worse in the majority of categories analyzed.
I did a search on one such study that is touted by pro-gay advocates as a good study: http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/11/12/study-children-of-lesbian-parents-do-fine/ . That study seems to leave out the fact that another study shows that kids raised by women who claimed to have had at least one lesbian relationship, were 1000% more likely to have been sexually abused during their childhood.
Not drivel, I’ve shown an actual case where this has happened and the mother had to leave the country in order to keep her child.
lol…I need evidence that a man isn’t a woman and can’t be a mother?? Seriously dude?? And you call me an idiot, that’s hilarious.
It’s not an assumption that mother/female and father/male are the natural biological roles, it’s a fact of nature. You need to ask your mommy to explain the birds and the bees to you again,
No, you don’t get it. By this definition, it’s impossible to do comparative analysis on anything at all. You can’t even compare penicillin vs. beating people over the head with a hammer as treatment for infection.
You don’t get to toss out the bits you disagree with and keep the rest. If it’s invalid on this subject, it’s invalid on all subjects.
Do you think it’s invalid on all subjects? Do you think that maybe beating people over the head with a hammer is a reasonable course of treatment for infection? If not, why not?
@annajones
I’m just going to make two points:
1- Are you aware of the Appeal to Nature fallacy? An example; no one could ever logically claim that houses are “natural”. And yet to claim that houses are necessarily bad would be seen by most people to be the height of stupidity.
2- The central claim of your argument appears to be that children need both a mother and a father figure who conform to traditional masculine and feminine gender roles (by the way, this is why single parent households were brought up, since by their very nature they lack one or the other). You have yet to prove this. The obvious corollary to your claim is that homosexual couples necessarily lack one or the other. You also have yet to prove this (hint: sex does not always conform to gender). Please do so.
@annejones
Apologies; I misspelled your ‘nym.
You showed nothing, Your word is drivel without evidence, and you never link to any.
All bigots have nothing but self-serving drivel to attempt to explain their unacceptable attitudes. Fuck off loser.
Shorter Annejones: Boys are from mars, girls are from venus because REASONS that I can not provide other than to refer you to assfax.com
Annejones, you are a bigot. A horrible, intolerant, intolerable bigot. I’d rather let children be raised by wild wolves than the likes of you.
Hey annejones
I’m not sure where you come from, but where I come from, you cite your fucking studies instead of making vague references to them.
Okay y’all, when it comes to the drones program – and other counter-terrorism measures – here’s why I think as I do.
It’s because I trust electricians.
I trust electricians to know all about how to set up and repair electrical systems and take it as axiomatic that they how to do their jobs competently and safely and to know what they are doing.
Like I trust plumbers to know how to do plumbing correctly.
As I trust welders to know about how to weld right.
I trust biologists when it comes to biology.
I trust climate scientists when it comes to climatology.
I trust rocket scientists when it comes to rocketry.
You see the pattern here I take it? Trust the experts in area X when they’re doing or talking about X because they’ve put the time and effort into learning all about their area of expertise and responsibility and are the one’s who do know what they’re talking about or doing.
So when it comes to counter-terrorism measures and fighting wars, I trust the experts.
The ones who are responsible for fighting wars and tasked with keeping us protected from the terrorists. Those folks would be the military’s, the US, Israeli and Aussie air force, navy, marines and armies, the SAS, Mossad, the SEALs, the CIA, Homeland Security, Shin Bet and all the various others who are directly trained, practiced, knowledgeable and responsible for this area. They are the professionals and experts here just as electricians are when it comes to electrical wiring.
Not bloggers or commenters on blogs, not lawyers and human rights activists or the general public in Western nations or even more so among of the so-called “Arab Street” – which is notoriously brain-washed and of dubious loyalty when it comes to fighting Jihadism. (In fact because of that, when, say, a lot of Pakistani’s complain about drone strikes its probably more an indication that the policy is effective rather than not. These are generally not people on our side or with our interests at heart here remember how they sheltered Osama Bin Fucking Laden for about a decade after 9-11?*)
I think it’s a very safe bet that every objection to, say, drone strikes that an unqualified blog commenter can make has already been considered in great depth and rejected by those responsible for running the UAVs program. Those who have to do the actual work and face the actual serious consequences of that work. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle pilots and commanders will have put years of thought, training and practice into this area and will know what they are talking about whereas the commenter is just going off the news or what xe’s gleaned from arrange of second, third or fourth hand sources.
Now, of course, anyone can have a opinion about counter-terrorism and war fighting measures such as drone strikes just as anyone can have an opinion about electrics. You can argue that drone strikes are wrong just as you can argue that overhead wires look ugly and should be replaced by giant Van der Graff generators sending lightning like sparks of electricity to power each home.
But if you want to have an opinion that deserves to be taken seriously and comes from a legitimate understanding of the counter-terrorism or military profession then here’s what you have to do :
Join the fuck up with the relevant military branches, put in the years of blood, sweat and tears and do the hard yards so that you’ve earned the right to fly drones and protect us from terrorism. Or better yet put in even longer to rise to the senior ranks in charge of the program and be the one’s who know about how such strikes are chosen and ordered. Do your job protecting the rest of us by performing counter-terrorism measures for at least five years and so you really have the experience and knowledge necessary to talk in this area. You need to know what you are talking about. Then – and only then – should you be taken really seriously on the issue.
(Note : “Appealing to authority / experts” is not always a fallacy or we wouldn’t have court cases where expert opinion is given! Nor would we prefer per-reviewed papers in science to blog rants when it comes to scientific issues. There are many times when listening to the experts and letting them do their jobs is the right thing to do.This is one of them.)
Not able or willing to do that? Well you still have the right to hold and express any ignorant, unqualified opinion such as criticising drone strikes by raising obvious objections that you can safely say have been considered and rejected about a million times by those performing the job but not to have your ignorant, inexpert opinion taken seriously since you literally do not know what you are talking about. All that non-military folks not working in counter-terrorism are qualified to do when discussing the issue to say to those doing their duties and risking life, limb and sanity is :
“Thankyou – we appreciate your service and keep up the good work.”
People (Such as the USA,British & Aussie military’s) who are fighting to protect us and our freedoms deserve our support.
People (Such as Al Quaida, Hamas, Jemaah Islamiyya and other Jihadist terrorist groups.) who are trying to kill us and take away our freedoms do not.
* The Pakistanis claim they didn’t know Osama was there. Really? About a decade living next door to a military base? When they already have a well-deserved reputation for playing both sides and being – at best – dodgy, unreliable “allies” and when the Pakistani’s helped create the Taliban in the first place? Yeah rii-iight. Pull the other one Pakistan, it has bells on it! Of course they fucken knew and lied about it and that’s why they weren’t told about the SEAL team Six raid that got him and also why they would’ve shot down their escaping SEAL team helicopter rather than congratulating them. And *that* is why the UAVs are there in the first place because the Pakistanis cannot be trusted to do the work of stopping Jihadist terrorists themselves.
PS. How the fuck doesn’t thinking like this make me a “horrible person” at all I wonder – at least in some misguided people’s eyes?
@6. anteprepro :
That above sentence is correct although I gather you meant it sarcasrtically. Of couse we should defer to the experts on couter-terorism and warfare if w eare not experst inthat ourselves. D’uh! I presume you are not an electrician – given that probability, do you then tell your electrician how to do their job? No. Exactly same applies here.
Like plotting or supporting terrorists attacks that kill plenty of innocent people – and I’d say in almost all cases it’s a fuck of lot more than just “suspecting” them.
Correction that’s interrogating the worst of the worst Jihadist criminals because they include individuals such as Khalid Sheik Mohammad the mastermind of the 9-11 atrocities which murdered over three thousand innocent people in order to learn about and prevent similar terrorist atrocities and thus save who knows how many innocent lives.
I hate Jihadist terrorist masterminds (who doesn’t or wouldn’t?) and have no sympathy whatsoever for them. They’re Jihadist terrorists – fuck ’em, they deserve everything they get and then worse!
In order to protect innocent people from Jihadist terrorists and other dangerous criminals.
Not done or thinking of doing anything wrong- then you won’t have a problem. They’ve got a massive fire-hose of info and are only going to be interested in the serious Jihadist cases that concern them and threaten all our common welfare.
Citation needed. You mean Iraq? Well, removing Saddam Hussein from power removed someone who was a tyrant who violated his nation’s human rights horrifically and who posed a clear threat to the region, supported terrorism* and who was stupidly bluffing about WMDs it turned out he didn’t have –but no one knew that at the time. Dow e really need to apologise for that?
Yes. People who are Jihadist terrorists who want to kill innocent people all around the globe including in their own nations.
Gee, do I detect a slight note of sarcasm here?
You think the USA is imperfect and flawed? Well, sure. I agree with that. I even agree my own nation could do much better – and generally our nations do try to do better. If our nations are not the “good guys” in your book- then who is? What non-Western nation offers better human rights, more opportunities, a freer, fairer, nicer society? The USA, Oz and the West generally may have their problems but I suggest they beat the alternatives hands down. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make our nations better –of course we should, but doesn’t mean we should unpatriotically kick into them and the freedoms they offer us all either!
5) Insulting and inaccurate.
4) Yes I would if it were true – it is not.
3) I don’t glorify violence. I think it is sometimes, sadly, the only option in self-defence against people using violence against us. If you have a gun and someone is about to kill your loved ones would you not shoot that person and save your loved ones if you could? That’s my thinking. We have to protect ourselves when we are being attacked.
I wish we weren’t in this situation – but I recognise the reality that we are.
I don’t glorify violence. I think it is a last resort and it is one I hardly ever resort to. I will avoid violence wherever possible – but not where it is impossible or where the consequences of avoiding violence are great harm to my self or other innocent people.
That’s your opinion – it is not an opinion I share.
Nor will I be silenced by those who misjudge me and think I should be silenced or abused or bullied on the basis of their own mischaracterisation due to their own failure of reading comprehension.
“Oh & if you meant to refer to me with your “racist asshat” slur please recall that saying something doesn’t make it so.” -StevoR
The fucking irony.
Is it? A lot of people seem awfully confused about what irony means. Guess we can add you to that list.
That was FYI a direct, accurate statement of fact.
Um, okay, you know the meaning of the word “reluctantly.” So? I don’t think definition 4 is in the dictionary. Nor am I a libertarian.
I’m not but even if I was that’s a non-sequiteur which ignores the fact that, yes, you did lose by Godwin there because you brought the Nazis into this online discussion. Thought everybody knew about that longstanding internet law?
* Yes, Saddam Hussein was supporting terrorism – he paid money to the families of homicide suicide bombers against Israel amongst other things. Ok, it is almost certain now that Saddam had no connection with 9-11 but that is a separate question. He did support terrorism and Islamism such as the groups that fought afterwards in his name..
Shorter StevoR:
We only kill all those innocents because terrorism!
@6. anteprepro -part III sorry :
(1) The good guys try NOT to kill innocent people which by definition makes them good guys. The bad guys *are* deliberately setting out to kill and are targeting innocents which is what makes them the bad guys. We hit their leaders and operatives, they hit our civilians, that’s the key difference.
(2) The Islamist idea of “martyrdom” is disgusting in ways that other ideas of martyrdom are not. Catholics for isntance do not count as martyrs those who strap bombs on themselves then blow themselves up in crowded places taking innocent lives. That latter is a uniquely Islamist idea.
***
@340. Amphiox :
Are you *seriously* denying the existence of Jihadists such as Al Quaida, Hamas, Jemaah Islamiyya and so on? Really?
Are you really going to claim such groups aren’t real and aren’t actually planning massive terrorist attacks aimed at murdering as many innocent people as they can?
What planet are you on? Wish I was there!
***
PS. Sorry about the typos and grammar errors that may be here – logging off for tonight, back later.
@SteveoR
This is a very good argument for only allowing trained drone pilots to fly the drones, and one I agree with. However, I fail to see how it is relevant to the idea that dropping bombs from on high can and does cause unnecessary “collateral damage”. The Military are generally not considered experts when it comes to ethical quanderies.
The rest of your screed fails to take into account two things:
1- That while bombing the shit out of whatever country you happen to think said terrorists reside in may be a very good way to combat said terrorists, it is still unethical. It is the ethics of it that people have a problem with.
2- Bombing the shit out of places is a proven and effective way of winning a conventional war. The war on terror is not a conventional war; it is a new and unfamiliar type of warfare where the enemy is poorly defined and where pretty much everyone is a potential recruit given the right pressures. Simply taking familiar tactics from conventional war and applying them here will not necessarily work, and indeed it is fast looking as if it really doesn’t work and may in fact be bolstering the numder of people who are trying to kill us. Which seems counter productive.
You’re forgetting a very important part: If you should doubt the competency of an electrician, you have the option of reading up on the subject and checking for yourself.
The reason we can trust experts is that we don’t actually have to trust them at all. The moment there’s any doubt, we always have the option of going back to the basic facts and checking for ourselves. So, if we suspect that a certain expert is allowing subjective political opinions to influence his analysis, we can run the analysis ourselves or hand off the information to another, independent expert and have them double check.
Then there’s the issue of accountability. If an electrician screws up and your house burns down due to faulty wiring, you can sue him. If a doctor screws up your operation, he could lose his license. They’re accountable to an external agent.
However, when it comes to terrorism, much of the information is unavailable to us. We simply don’t have the same ability to check up on the work of these “experts” and if they screw up (assuming we even find out when they do), they’re not accountable to anyone but themselves. As a result, we should adjust our trust in them accordingly.
So, can we see this analysis? Can we hear their reasons and check the information they base their decisions on? Are we allowed access to the military files and reports that discuss the pros and cons of this issue?
There’s a reason why we expect scientists to publish their work and submit it for peer review. There’s a reason we expect them to tell us about their methods, the data gathered and the analysis, not just the conclusion.
The reason is that we’re not idiots and we’re well aware that every profession has its share of bad apples. Fancy titles do not guarantee honesty. Transparency does.
I trust experts. You trust experts blindly. There’s a big fucking difference.
10 GOTO 10
Hey SteveoR, I know a guy who can get you some straw real cheap; since you appear to have used all yours…
StevoR @530:
Losing by Godwin is a thing? I thought Godwin’s law was just an observation, but I don’t keep up with internet traditions. And I still prefer “if the shoe fits”.
lbg: The internet equivalent of leg before wicket.
@StevoR
Okay, so we should trust the authorities, because there are all these scary jihadists out there trying to kill us.
Can I ask you a serious question?
Why is it that when you look at the people who want to kill us, and you look back about twenty or thirty or forty years in their nation’s history, you find that people in the West were either killing people there directly or by proxy?
What an amazing coincidence that this should be true of all those places where people hate us and want to kill us!
Any ideas on why this is?
Saddam Hussein, mega-murderer, supporter of terrorism, … perhaps you could remind me again how it is that he came to power, StevoR?
God, did I really just wake up to a ‘trust your government’ screed?
I really do not care how the racist asshat has justified his masturbatory warmongering. I do find it amusing that we should not judge those in charge bc REASONS. We should just trust the government. A government that has never made mistakes. A government that has never engaged in tactics that have killed innocents. A government that claims to support democracy, but invades sovereign countries and kills citizens therein. No, I will not place blind trust in an authority figure.
Blind, unthinking obediance to authority is something I rejected when I applied the principles of skepticism to claims about the world.
Notice how the Racist AssWitGot does not ever mention the innocent civilians that are killed in drone strikes?
Notice how StevoWarmongeR never addresses the links provided that criticize the USs aggressive tactics?
Notice how StevoMcBigot once again demonstrates how deep his racism is?
Notice how the House Bigot thinks we never figured out any of that already? As if his love for authoritarianism were never clear.
The asswipe is still an asswipe.
He is still a bigot who believes that somehow low level members of terrorist groups pose a direct threat to anyone in the US or Australia.
He displays his repellent racism again in his comments about Pakistan in this thread.
He just assumes that ‘kill them before they kill us’ is an effective way of combatting terrorism.
He embraces ‘might makes right’ to such a degree that he is blind to the substantial criticisms of that philosophy.
He claims to have humanist values, but given that his unjustified fears of Muslims in general and Islamic extremists specifically, have led to embracing tactics antithetical to humanism, he is not living up to the ideas of humanism. In fact, his support for drone strikes shows the lack of value he places on *some* of humanity. Please note that he always qualifies this as being about militant islamic extremists, yet he NEVER mentions the growing numbers of innocent lives lost in these attacks nor the long term effects of living in constant fear.
His latest rant simply assumes that drone strikes are necessary. No critical thought given to whether or not this is an effective strategy. No acknowlegment that destroying the lives of innovents will create more people who hate us. No addressing the increased likelihood that terrorist ranks will swell in the future with people whos lives were shattered in drone attacks.
His latest rant also, once again, does not address any of the links I and others have provided. Several of these show how high the cost in human life this War on Terror is.
No, you hateful, bilge filled bigot, we have heard you say this shit before.
You said nothing new, merely restating your bigoted views and showing what an uncritical, NON-humanist you are. You do not value human life. You do not care if innocents die (unless they are from Australia or the US. Then the lives lost provide justification for invading countries, toppling governments, creating and perpetuating a climate of fear, and killing whomever without so much as a trial.
Yep. Thsts StevoR for you: uncritical, racist, warmongering, asshole extraordinaire.
StevoR: Just because you are terrified of brown-skinned terrorists does not make it okay to cause massive collateral damage. As someone pointed out only 1 in 50 people killed in drone attacks is a terrorist. Intriguingly by killing people’s friends and family pointlessly you inspire people to hate us and want to bring us down, thereby creating more terrorists. If you actually wanted to stay safe from the dark-skinned boogieman who hates your freedoms you’d want the government be more careful with how they kill.
Ah who am I kidding, it’s never about terrorists with you StevoR, it’s all about them dirty non-Westerners with their swarthy skin right? That’s why you suggested that anyone who goes to the funeral of a suspected terrorist ought to be killed as a terrorist sympathizer right? It’s why you consider the world split between “West” and “Non-West” with Non-West being inherently backwards and evil right? It’s also why every single time you come in here talking about race people can bring up a wealth of previous examples of you being a hateful racist who seems to get off imagining the torment of those evil foreigners burning in hell.
StevoR please leave. We don’t want you.
As for you Annejones I’m rather impressed you’re still here, normally you take much longer breaks before you drop your load of stupid. I, like most everyone here, would like to know why you think children need both a culturally standard male and a culturally standard female as parents. I’d like to know why a man can’t play a woman’s role, a woman can’t play a man’s role, why you think this assumption doesn’t apply to single parents, why you believe so strongly in such rigidly enforced gender role, and whether or not you realize that when you make the naturalistic fallacy everyone here understands you say it because you’re a hateful bigot.
Still doing a bang up job Stevie
Maybe we can just use this as the copypasta standard response when StevoR talks at all?
Anne Jones, please answer chigau’s question from the previous thread:
“Excluding gestation and lactation, what are male and female parental roles?”
Should be amusing.
Oy…
It’s amusing how paranoid bigots think they are rational, but they can’t see their real meanness underneath their ignorance and hypocrisy. There is no excuse for bigotry. There is only their paranoid explanation and faulty rationalizations that confirm their bigotry. And it appears most folks don’t want to share your paranoia.
@Nerd
Again StevoR and his ilk
Wrong again, oh ignorant one.
Money represents the promise for future work to be done. Implicit in all financial transactions is the exchange of work already done for the promise of future work in exchange. Money represents that promise for future work. It can be devalued because future work can be devalued.
This requires an extensive rewriting of the memory, and of EVERY SINGLE NEWS ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE RUNUP TO THE WAR.
In fact, when it became apparent that the US was building up to war Iraq began cooperating with the UN weapons inspectors in ways they hadn’t before.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=6383&Cr=iraq&Cr1=inspect#.Uf_Him12m1g
Hmmm, yeah, he sure was bluffing, huh!
No one?
Hans Blix knew. His entire organization of UN inspectors knew. The government of France knew. As did most of the governments of Europe. Probably half the operatives in the CIA knew. Colin Powell knew. George Bush and Dick Cheney were told.
It would appear that StevoR does not know how to count.
You are pathetic, StevoR. You twist my words is the same disgustingly dishonest manner as creationists and global warming deniers twist the words of real scientists.
The existence of the jihadists DOES NOT JUSTIFY your bigotry. IT IS NOT A LEGITIMATE REASON for your disgusting revenge-fantasies. NONE of their actions warrant the level of DISPROPORTIONATE response you salivate at the thought of using against them, which inflict damage far more effectively on the innocent civilians in their vicinity while the terrorists themselves not infrequently get away.
With every post you sink lower and reveal yourself as an even viler excuse for human being.
You are disgusting.
A single-parent household is also a single-sex-parent household.
Jesus Haploid Christ.
Fixed that for you.
Your obsession with the biological cell sources of a child would end up with giving a serial rapist all of his victims’ children.
If same-sex parents are “nannies”, then all parents are “nannies”.
Since “balance between genders” in parenting isn’t required — and sometimes doesn’t exist — even in heterosexual marriages, your bringing it up at all is nothing more than a stupid exercise in bigotry.
Role model, shmole model. You don’t need to be straight to demonstrate responsibility, and being straight is no guarantee of being responsible.
…which is to say, anyone who is willing and able to raise children and provide for children’s needs.
… or just a mother, or just a father, or two mothers, or two fathers…
Like an irresponsible heterosexual couple who don’t even like children, let alone want anything to do with raising them.
Now you’re just lying.
Because the mother demonstrated repeatably, for years, that she was not responsible.
PS: drone strikes–making the country safer?
Or legalizing terrorist actions against us?
http://www.shakesville.com/2013/04/quote-of-day_15.html
“He said: “If it is lawful for the U.S. to drone al Qaeda associates whereever they find them, then it is also lawful for al Qaeda to target U.S. military or infrastructure where ever (militants) find them.””
Also, some citations:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/26/study_finds_us_drone_strikes_in
Surprise, surprise, drone strikes miss militants and terrorize the civilian population, according to a study… by the Stanford and New York University law schools.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/al-qaeda-in-yemen/study-suggests-yemen-strikes-are-radicalizing-population/
Study suggests Yemen strikes are radicalizing the population. Another big surprise.
You respect authority, right, StevoR?
Here’s Admiral (that’s ADMIRAL) Mike Mullen:
http://www.jcs.mil/speech.aspx?id=1336
There are tons more that can be found from official sources.
StevoR, do you see how you have constructed a counter-factual narrative?
I have discovered that the British Museum will email high resolution artwork to one for free. I’ve ordered “Quincampoix”, another satirical drawing mocking James Law’s efforts set up his financial system. Low resolution image here. The rodents on the right have the comment: “In plaas van geldt, Rotte keutels.” (Dutch: “In place of money, rat droppings.”)
The windmills in the coat of arms indicate Law’s hot air (he was powered by wind, some have said.)
Given his prior comment, I’m pretty sure that he’s advocating for Stoic indifference in the face of insults and taunts, and possibly in the face of non-lethal assaults.
I note that txpiper has never complained about tone, or about being called a bigoted asshole. On the other hand, neither has he really changed his bigotry, or his fundamental assholishness. Being insulted means that he feels virtuous in ignoring whatever else is being said.
For some, Stoicism means being calm and centered. For others, it means being contemptuous and self-centered.
======
In fairness, the mineral being white does not necessarily mean that it’s actually white jade. But I note that he did not try to have the piece appraised or evaluated by an expert, or even attempt the hardness test described by the article whose link I provided.
Right, more responses to other comments I missed:
What the heck is a “second parent”??
Correct. She provided neither the sperm nor the egg for the child, nor did she carry the child for 9 months or give birth to her. Her only connection to the child is the fact that she was the mother’s sexual partner for awhile. Sorry but giving that wretched woman the same right to the child as you would a biological parent is just as evil and immoral as allowing babies to be killed as a means of birth control. That is a travesty of justice, and probably the single most immoral part of the homosexual agenda.
No, not when that law tells a perfectly good parent that has no allegations against her that she has to give up her biological daughter to a wretched, evil, horrendous human being who isn’t even related to the child. Yes, that law should be circumvented by any means necessary.
I know what you’ll say. You’ll make some appeal to Jenkins’ name being on the birth certificate. But as what, mother #2?? What the heck is a mother #2, and what role did she play in the conception or birth of the child?? Absolutely none. Lisa Miller is the child’s mother, and a child has only one biological mother. End of story.
The child was not legally adopted by the witch, Jenkins, so adoption is not a part of this discussion. Miller is her biological mother, and a child has only one biological mother. There were absolutely no legal reasons for removing the child from her mother’s care. If you still defend Jenkins in this case then you are as big a POS as she is.
All those families still have one mother role and one father role, and still follow biology as closely as possible. So how does homosexual contracts and making sexual partners equal to parents fit into that mix?? Right, it doesn’t.
And yet the consistent aspect is that Man + Woman = Marriage. Wow, there goes that defence of SSM.
If you’d stop being such a whiney little bitch and think the scenario through rationally, you’d realize that two homosexual adults who have already lived through being a homosexual teen would probably be more helpful to that teen, than two straight people.
I love you too
Fuck you, Anne Jones.
Some peoples’ biological parents are complete and utter assholes, and you denigrate not only same-sex parents but also step-parents in your hateful diatribe.
And your use of “bitch” and “witch” are sexist, hateful terms used for generations to put down women.
I see we have to add Torture Supporter* to the litany of StevoR’s repugnant ignorant views.
I should not be surprised, but I was mildly shocked to see him refer to torture as ‘interrogation’. Given his blind, uncritical support for the War on Terror, I was being charitable in my assumption that he would not condone torture.
This further demonstrates his rejection of humanist values.
All humans have basic rights, even those whom we abhor. To assert that some category of humans is no longer entitled to basic human rights is to assert that some humans are unequal to others.
No matter the justification, regarding any group of humans as undeserving of rights is to open the door to support for horrific atrocities. History has plenty of examples of what happens when some Group X is not regarded as human.
I would not have thought it possible for my disdain for StevoR to increase, but once again extending any charity toward him was a mistake.
You are one of the most repugnant, morally reprehensible
AnneJones:
What, exactly, can a father do that a mother cannot, and a mother do that a father cannot, with the exception of the initial sperm and egg donation and incubation/breastfeeding?
Until you attempt to answer that question, I suspect that continuing to engage you will be an exercise in introducing one’s head to various nearby solid objects in a somewhat forceful manner, and I’ve already got a fucker of a headache as it is, so I’m not even getting my usual enjoyment out of reading other people tell you where to stick it.
But you really should have a little think about that question.
Anne, answer the damn question. What, specifically, are the male and female roles in parenting?
That’s exactly what you’re doing by being insistent on biological parents. All a man has to do to fulfill that requirement is be a sexual partner. He could be an abuser or a deadbeat or, as Owlmirror keeps pointing out, a serial rapist.
Exactly. He bases his entire assessment that the jade is fake solely on his observation that it is white, when said observation is equally consistent with the jade being legitimate. Then he uses this assessment, for which he has zero legitimate reason to make, to try to support a bigoted stereotype. He makes no actual effort to ascertain what is actually true before spouting his mouth off. He accepts the flimsiest of arguments, without even making the effort to check it, so long as it supports the preconceived prejudices he already has.
@511
Can you explain what these hundreds of trillions of dollars of liabilities are? I hear this get thrown around a lot and so finally went to find a reference:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323353204578127374039087636.html
This description is misleading for several reasons:
First off, it appears they are calculating the total amount of all benefits eventually due under (Medicare/Social Security/etc) to all people now alive. However, we don’t have to pay those costs now, we only have to pay the annual costs of the people presently partaking in those programs. Comparing future costs to present assets is bad accounting.
Second off, it doesn’t appear to calculate future income into the consideration. Comparing costs without incomes is inappropriate for making financial decisions. This holds true for both future finances and present finances.
Third off, while all this talk about future obligations, there is no mention of how far into the future this is stretching. Are these estimates across the next 30 years, the next 60 years, the next 100 years? Certainly there will be enormous variability in all of these estimates, but that doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere either.
Fourth, liabilities are not “bad”–they simply indicate a responsibility. It is completely possible that the Social Security Administration, for example, has rules for what can be considered a liability on the balance sheet (all living citizens, all enrolled, all citizens above the age of X); it’s also likely they have other worksheets where they track related data to prevent surprises. Understanding the logic behind this is key to understanding if there is a problem and how large it actually is. Banks, for example, list customer deposits as liabilities: not because they don’t like customers nor because they expect to pay every penny of it tomorrow but because it is money that isn’t theirs. They are responsible for returning those monies at some point or another and listing as a liability is a reminder.
Txpiper, what I’d like for you to do to justify the claim is as follows: Identify some of the major sources of the “at least a hundred trillion” of liabilities. Clearly delineate whether these are present or future liabilities; if future, provide a year and summary of the methods for calculating; and include a description of assets & equity that match the same time frame.
The science has already spoken, annejones. There is no measurable detriment to children raised by same-sex parents red to those raised by their biological parents, solely attributable to the fact that the couple is same-sex. There is no measurable detriment to children raised by non-biological parents compared to those raised by their biological parents. The only measurable detriment to children raised by a single parent compared to those raised by their biological parents is the loss of the resources that would be provided by a second parent, not only in money, but also in time, attention, and care.
Everything you have fapped so far is irrelevant. The things you think are important for parenthood simply aren’t. It is fantasy. Your fantasy. So go take it to your next D&D play session and stop polluting the real world with your filth.
All you have succeeded in doing so far is to vividly demonstrate how religion produces toxic, immoral, unethical, and evil behavior. For that we atheists are eternally grateful. You have become one of our most effective propaganda instruments.
Bravo, annejones. Keep up the good work on behalf of the cause.
The US debt is primarily the result of obscenely, immorally, low tax rates. The debt numbers are simply an accounting shell game, a relabeling of obligations. Instead of calling it money that should be paid in taxes, it is instead called money owed as an individual’s share of the nation’s debt. The debt is directly analogous to a flat tax (the most regressive kind, of course) deferred to an unspecified future time when it will all have to paid as an enormous lump sum, instead of in regular manageable instalments.
So, economic stupidity as well as dishonesty.
Seeing as how the texpip is so, so, so concerned about future liabilities, I imagine he uses only cash. No credit cards, no cheques. As all of those are commitments to payment in the future.
So, this seems appropriate to the recent hate against women… http://www.explosm.net/comics/3250/
Annejones’ Inconvenient truth
Grousing that has nothing at all to do with anything:
Sites my workplace’s blocker blocks:
(1) Questionable Content (the webcomic)
(2) Manboobz (the blog)
(3) Reddit (reddit)
Sits my workplace’s blocker does not block:
(1) Oglaf (the “webcomic”)
(2) Stormfront (racist)
I am ye baffled.
Hmm…Looks like McAfee is giving Pharyngula the orange eye again. At least it’s not red, which mean blocked.
annejones: Please answer the question posed by several commenters already: What is a “mother role” and a “father role”? What does a mother do while raising a child that a father does not, and vice versa?
I know this is the Dome and all, but if annejones were banned not a tear would be shed by me. Xe does not engage honestly and the level of naked hatred xe displays, honest though it may be (unlike StevoR in denial land), reminds me of the Westboro Baptist Church.
IIRC, xe has never responded to me, which chokes me up so much (/snark). Perhaps as a gay man who is physically and emotionally attracted to men for biological reasons (nope, no history of abuse and I had the presence of my mother and father my whole life), xe hss nothing to attack me on.
But after that ‘wretched’ comment, I find her just as detestable as StevoR. They are both horrible bigots who–from comments here–demonstrate no redeemable qualities. Neither of them brings anything to the table. They are horrifyingly toxic and this place would be better without them.
Oh and ANNEJONES, I pity and despise you.
I lost any pity I had for StevoR long ago.
http://www.nelsonhaha.com/
Academic workplaces don’t block anything. =8-) Come, come to the dork side of the farce!
Fixed that for you.
Your bigotry is noted.
Are we making ludicrous false analogies now? Kidnapping a child and hauling her to Nicuragua is just as evil and immoral as drowning children to send them to heaven.
More bigotry fixed.
Lisa Miller denied Jenkins her visitation rights. Custody would not have been transferred if Miller had not already been a lawbreaker.
Your contempt for the law is noted.
Your contempt for step-parents is noted.
If Jenkins had been a sterile male, would you be having this pathetic stupid hate-filled meltdown?
Obviously not the end of story.
More bigotry fixed.
Adoption is not part of this discussion because the child was born into a legal union of Jenkins and Miller, making Jenkins one of the parents by default.
Sure there was. Her biological mother was a lawbreaker. She is now also a kidnapper. Oh, and also an abuser of animals.
Jenkins is legally in the right. Miller is obviously in the wrong.
You’re a big POS either way.
It looks like in addition to being a horrible, hate-filled bigot, you’re also stupid and illiterate. Or possibly just blinded by hate.
By being an additional exception to the “rule”. Which is really more of a guideline
Still made stupid by hate, I see.
Your misogyny is noted.
Why is Oglaf scare quoted?
I agree 100%
I was really tempted to refute the things annejones and StevoR were saying. And then I realized “wait, they’re basically just saying shit they’ve already said before, refuted by things that have already been explained to them, multiple times”. So…
StevoR, just shut the fuck up for once in fucking life. You are incapable of learning and incapable of understanding why your idiocy frustrates us. We have tolerated you for far too fucking long. Just fuck right off, you fucking myopic, denialistic, xenophobic assclown.
Annejones, you are a fucking slimy bigoted asshole. You don’t care about anything except for traditions and structure that gives you personal comfort, and have no real concern for other people’s rights or well-being. You have no view for how to practically achieve a common good, you simply want to find excuses to deprive gay people of rights. Go fuck yourself, you blinkered hatemonger.
Wow. When AnneJones first mentioned the Miller case, I thought. “I’ll bet the facts are ….”, and that’s exactly what they turned out to be. AnneJones isn’t just wrong, she’s predictably wrong.
Speaking of AnneJones (and not to her), I liked how she started with the idea that same-sex parents are religiously wrong—just a sentence early in her first tirade on the subject—but has since argued strictly from biology. Misunderstood biology, of course, but ungodly biology. (She may be trying to argue that “our” science says we must agree, but she’s failing in a couple of ways.)
anteprepro:
Yeah, their same old, same old routine long ago passed its expiration date.
When I was new to posting here, I wondered why Nerd’s standard reply to unevidenced drivel was frequently the same.
I get it now.
Refuting the same tired “arguments” gets wearisome at some point.
Google Maps does. That means you know, too.
The Bible puts “thou […] shalt not be found again” into God’s Own Mouth.
The Bible is wrong.
Are you seriously saying “but it’s only wrong on this tiny point, so it’s actually still infallible if we just squint hard enough”?
WTF. There’s nothing surprising whatsoever about human greed and human stupidity. It’s not a miracle. :-D
Nope. (Perhaps it’s completely drowned out by the ongoing NSA/MI6 scandal?) Hell, the whole state of California went bankrupt or nearly so not long ago, due simply to a transparent clusterfuck of stupidity.
Everything is the way it is because it got that way.
Example:
Six-legged insects are all over the place. Six-legged vertebrates? *crickets chirping* Mutations might manage to duplicate a pair of legs and put it somewhere in the middle of the ribcage (interrupting the ribcage!) or perhaps on the tail, but I can’t imagine selection for that kind of thing, while selection against it is a no-brainer. The crickets chirp on, and the closest thing to limb formation in the middle of the ribcage is the fact that the ribs grow into the body wall in the developing turtle shell.
You have pretensions of being Necessarily Evil. Get off it.
That’s exactly it: your thought is unreasonable, and your experience – indeed your knowledge in general – is highly limited.
Did you seriously believe the people who programmed your spellchecker know the entire vocabulary of the entire English language?
Told you your thought is unreasonable.
Simple, and stupid.
When I started writing scientific papers, the very first thing my thesis supervisor said to me was (paraphrasing from memory): “You will be misunderstood – by someone, at some point, for some reason –, therefore it’s your responsibility to minimize the opportunities for this.”
When someone’s interpretation differs from your intent, it’s not their reading that’s wrong. Your writing is wrong. If you haven’t managed to express yourself clearly enough, that’s your fault.
Get used to it, young padawan.
Except when they’re being used as human shields by the jihadists or otherwise stand too close. Then they must be punished by death.
That’s what you said in comment 196. If you didn’t mean it, go ahead and explain yourself, because you wrote it, and we can only read what you write. We can’t read your mind.
Well said.
Well, maybe he does, but there’s no way of telling – his memory is a colander.
Subthread won.
The one that comes to mind is Thomas Gottschalk. Typical? Quite the opposite, he’s extreme in having done game shows for decades, which is why he comes to mind first. The next one I think of is Stefan Raab, for pretty much the same reason…
That’s what StevoR keeps saying. Comment 397 was trolling.
What I just said: if you’re misunderstood, it’s your fault.
+ 1
“Strong”…
You know who else wanted his subjects to be “strong”?
No, seriously. Think about it.
Think about how pathetic it is to be worried all the time about whether other people think you’re strong. Pathetic? People have killed themselves, and murdered countless others, for fear of appearing weak.
Love thy neighbor, except if they belong to the previous generation?
A strong stance you’re taking here. And a hypocritical and evil one.
Of course he’s serious. Being a scientist, he knows how often ideas that seem just plain obvious have turned out to be wrong.
Your turn. Support your assertion with evidence, or accept that it has to be dismissed.
It’s been said that science is just organized common sense. That’s wrong, massively wrong.
It’s warped? That’s another one of those assertions.
Yeeeeeeeees… ask her about the bees and the termites; ask her about the hornbills and the ostriches and the phalaropes.
“I teach the older kids, and the older kids teach the younger kids. Just a pity that nobody ever taught me anything.”
– Cletus
Oh, so do I. When electricians appear to contradict highschool physics, however – that’s when I start asking a lot of questions.
And when they end up killing people…
You don’t believe that yourself.
Stop being ridiculous.
No, torture is torture, no matter what the intent behind it.
No, what people deserve is not a good basis for a system of justice. If the just punishment for murder is death, what do you do with someone who has murdered two people?
No, torture is not a reliable way of getting information. It’s well known that people say anything to make it stop. Stop lying to yourself.
Two words for you, colander-for-brains: Hans Blix.
Did Howard manage to keep him and the rest of the UN inspectors off the TV in Australia, or what? Or have you simply decided to ignore what the experts said and kept saying till Fearless Flightsuit chased them out of Iraq?
In the real world most of us live in, it was painfully obvious that Captain Unelected wanted to have his war no matter what anyone else thought about it. A strong man by txpiper’s definition.
It’s deeply embarrassing to watch you move the goalposts like this. Have you no shame?
ASALA
PKK
LTTE
Look them up.
She lived in the household. I can’t imagine she didn’t care for the child. I can’t imagine she vanished into thin air whenever she wasn’t having sex.
Wait, what – wretched?
Denying visitation rights in defiance of a court order, that’s wretched, and it’s what the other woman did.
*headshake* I don’t even know where to begin.
…other than denying visitation rights in defiance of a fucking court order…
What, pray tell, makes Jenkins wretched, evil and horrendous? Be specific and explain why.
Stop pretending that only biological parents of the same children can marry.
“I can’t imagine it, so it must not exist!!!1! Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!eleventyone!!”
I think you understand full well how deeply ridiculous you sound.
What role did she play in the upbringing of the child?
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.
– Albert Einstein
I just gotta love annejone’s logic, though. I provide examples of how the marriage has varied over time. But she says that that doesn’t matter, because there was always (at least one) woman and (at least one) man, so therefore gay marriage is still redefining marriage, and apparently that is still a Big Deal.
I provide examples of how families vary, and how there are plenty of families that aren’t limited to mommy, daddy, and kids. Her response is to say “well, none of those have two daddies, or two mommies”! Ergo gay people are redefining families!
So, basically, the only way that gay couples would be acceptable is if gay couples were already deemed acceptable in history. So, dear lurkers, don’t let her fool you into thinking that she is anything but a slavish adherent to the status quo, a capricious preserver of tradition for tradition’s sake. A person who will use any rhetorical trick she can to put herself in direct opposition to progress and equality.
annejones plays D&D???
I am…shocked. Extremely startled. My ghasts are completely flabbered.
Also, appalled. Keep your Unsympathetic Magic offa my game!
+1
(I have decided to Disbelieve the part about annejones playing D&D, or any kinda tabletop RPG.)
–
Hah! Glad I decided not to fisk the latest from our loyal pests. If I had, I would have been riding on the coattails of David M doing what David M does best anyway!
I don’t talk to my bio-dad and am married to someone who never had one. Fuck you.
Many dunderheaded thugs confuse “rutheless” with “smart” and/or “strong”
I want to send my old campaign’s genderqueer paladin of mercy to give her a smite upside the head with her wooden sword
Indeed. As if we need to have any more disheartening tales of assorted bigotries in the nerdospheres.
clarification: said character carried a wooden sparing sword as her/his primary weapon because it was inherently nonlethal. She/he only broke up the actual sword for really important things.
*shrug* okay.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/us/beliefs-study-medieval-rituals-same-sex-unions-raises-question-what-were-they.html?pagewanted=all
via Cracked
According to Towleroad his 1994 book is being re-released as an ebook.
That’s actually a pretty cool idea and a good expression of what a truly lawful good character’s philosophy should entail. Too many paladins (run by DMs or other players) just wind up being just as reckless and violent as non-good characters, but just far more smug about it (in fairness, they were less likely to pick fights in cities and less likely to steal, etc.). A paladin that actually puts effort into not killing has actually been a rarity in the various campaigns I’ve ever been in, and it is alarming to me that it sounds like an interesting idea when it should be pretty fucking obvious and common!
Hah, awesome. I can already here the rush for the memory hole on that one!
@anteprepro
Yeah it was a good job on the player and I rolled with it. the character was sort of an inverse of the sterotypical paladin as being part of a under ground rail road, they where already blatantly stealing and breaking the law. So petty crimes/larceny for a good cause was ok, but measured response with force and voilence.
I like it. Should use that for inspiration in my own super perfect ultimate campaign that I will never ever actually get in working condition! Pipe dreams, ya know.
@anteprepro
If interested in using some of those ideas, we did tweak the Paladin powers. mostly we replaced “Sense Evil” with a psychometry ability. skin to skin touch lets a Paladin get a vision of an evil act the person commited. My idea was that by doing this it opened up ways to reveal plot hooks to players and deteered Paladins from “kill em all” tactics. As an aside also meant gloves for Paladins least they get bombared with visions of mostly petty evil acts people around them commited. Also tied into the idea of discliplin with a paladin as it was a clear sacrifice/burden they had to carry in order to weild their powers
Actually, that skin to skin touch seems like a good idea too. For NPC paladins, just being able to constantly whether someone within 20 yards is a Baddie or not really ruins the game for manipulative evil players (my brother played a really clever one in what wound up being a very stagnant paladin-dominated campaign world). For PC paladins, being able to do the same ruins manipulative evil NPCs who don’t magically hide their alignment and also makes paladins far more trigger happy, because they KNOW that those orcs really do live up to all the stereotypes, and KNOW that the vaguely suspicious guy has a heart as black as coal. Knowing one evil deed, and finding it out by touch, just seems so much better. It makes it more personal, more tactical, and makes it harder to just scan the room for Baddies. Hell, it doesn’t even mean that you know that the person is necessarily evil! Really cool idea, thematically and mechanically.
(The problem is that there are so many cool homebrew ideas that I want to use that I sometimes get to the point where I wonder why I don’t just give up and write my own RPG or something!)
It is not. I scare quoted “webcomic,” because Oglaf ain’t exactly your typical webcomic.
Ing, that sounds like an awesome paladin! Too often, the DM doesn’t make them play their alignment, and allows a huge personal wealth build-up “so they can one day build a temple”…but “one day” never comes, and the character doesn’t even make any moves in the general direction of building one, but borrows freely from the “temple fund” for unnecessary personal expenditures.
–
Well, consider this fappery:
D&D is notable roles requiring strict definitions, some of which are as closely based on biology as possible. The undead are created evil. Chromatic dragons are born evil. Paladins must be lawful good. Bards must not be lawful. Elves are born with a racial proficiency in archery.
But perhaps annejones’ insistence on translating her fantasy rules into real life would make her not so much a table-top D&D player, but rather a LARPA.
In wuxia fantasy there are characters who carry wooden swords, or blunted swords, or fight exclusively with the blunt edge of their weapon, for exactly the same reason.
In real life this was one of the reasons the Shaolin monks adopted the waxwood staff as their primary weapon of choice.
Though all of these weapons are still capable of cracking skulls….
I spent a significant amount of time today (holiday in Canada) trying out ‘adventure games’ from the iStore.
I have learned:
– everyone is white
– ALWAYS take the key
– “free”: they keep using that word …
*puts on Militant Atheism Hat for a minute*
In fairness, the kind of selfish asshole warmongering paladin that we all love to hate is an accurate simulation of real-life self-righteous religious zealots! The only problem is that paladins acting like paladins while being forced to call themselves Lawful Good waters down the definitions of Lawful and Good for everyone else. Just like religious morality in real life!
The mother who birthed you is not as worthy of honor as the mother who raised you. – Ancient Chinese aphorism.
This notably is a culture that put filial piety as the trump value that supercedes all others. With a legend wherein a woman flouts every single gender prohibition her society had to offer and is celebrated as a heroine because she did it for the sake of protecting her father’s life and reputation. Where, at least in literature, generals can betray their kings, and be completely forgiven, welcomed back, without nary a slap on the wrist, so long as they did it to save their parents’ lives.
Uniquely Islamist?
So now Samson is a uniquely Islamist character?
I give you Miko Miyazaki from The Order of the Stick.
I believe experienced D&D players have a term for that: Lawful Stupid.
If you haven’t learned the first one by now, I’m surprised you learned it at all :P
Also, I now want to design a game where unnecessary keys will fuck you over. Perhaps I will title it “Holy shit, rummage through your pocket and find the right key to the fucking front door before you drop that bag of groceries!”. Gritty realism will abound.
Also, I am endlessly entertained by the new and unique variety of ways that free games screw you over if you don’t fork over cash. My favorite is making it incredibly painful and time consuming to level up such that it is virtually impossible (but not actually impossible) to be competitive in the game unless you pay for an easier way to level up. It is an artful assholery. A most elegant slap to the genitals.
You forget the first D&D Commandment: DM is God of the Campaign and of the Setting. All Game Book rules are Guidelines and subject to final approval/tweaking
Yup the setting was made to have a wuxia like feel to it. Other characters where a old before his time reforming mercinary, a properly paranoid and prepared bard, an eldrich touched by Vorlons alchemist/wizard, a theif queen, and a jolly giant gregarious ogre brawler.
Yeah fixed due to RPing, and making it for the campaign goals they where working for an organization, so the Paladin gave any treasure accumulated to the org and the players got requisitions as rewards over standard dungeon looting.
They posed as a music band. One NPC was a mad scientist girl genius who would make them magic items out of parts of demons or abberitions they brought back. It wound up as a running gag for one arch villian that each encounter they were using more and more weapons made out of him while he was relying more and more on magical or clockwork replacements.
Also a traditional Lawful Stupid Paladin type DID show up in the game. As a villian. The fact that he acted with a “kill them all” attitude in a world where demons and spirits were not garunteed to be malicious put him squarely in lawful evil.
on the ‘forking over cash’ thing…
I understand that there are actual humans developing these game, in actual meat-space time but
please
don’t tell me it’s “free” if it ain’t
“do you really think that your ludicrous distortions of evolutionary biology are what biologists actually think?”
Unfortunately, no distortions are necessary. Lots of cautious metaphorical language, but there is no need to exaggerate.
===
”In other words, work to change the culture, rather than teach kids that violence is wrong, except for when it isn’t.”
Come on Tony. You aren’t going to change the culture. I would think from the evolutionary view, “Nature, red in tooth and claw…” should well illustrate what an uphill chase that is. Not to mention invoking unnatural human constructs like “wrong”.
But, hoping that don’t, if you wind up in a really bad situation, what would you do?
===
”It would appear that the texpip, ignorant as always, does not know that some forms of jade ARE white.”
Yeah, but this piece was only white underneath some sort of glaze or dye. But I appreciate your expertise.
”Here is his whole original statement in its entirety.”
I was commenting on the person Tony offended. It is a lot easier to just commit to not being easily taken down by words. It is letting someone else control your peace of mind. You would probably have a hell of time mastering this, but it is a really good mental health tactic. Children taught this early have a fantastic advantage that will last them a lifetime, though that is drifting dreadfully close to a hideous Bible quote.
===
LykeX,
”they’ll literally starve. Honest, hard-working people; starving to death.
Are you OK with that? If not, what should we do about it?”
Of course not, and I don’t know what to do about it. Once people wind up on the vacuum side of the treasury, they are never going to just decline further payment. What I expect is that there will be bailouts. In a situation like Detroit, riddled with crime, functional illiteracy and unemployment, you can’t exactly expect the residents to come up with a few billion. The downside to this is that the Fed is eroding the value of the US dollar. People on fixed incomes, like pensions, wind up being the victims.
”Money is all about what work people are willing to do in the future, not what they’ve done in the past.”
Money is a medium of immediate exchange. The value of it is measured by how much it is worth in labor or commodities. Loans and interest are about future commitments, not money. But you are right in regards to what people did in the past, and this is the sorry side of a debt-destabilized, politicized economy. A lifetime of savings can wind up meaning nothing. Sooner or later, the Fed is going to have to stop monetizing debt and holding interest rates down, or there won’t be a bond market.
cicely:
So have I.
I have decided to disbelieve that txpiper is a Christian of any kind.
Then why do you do it? Do you just like being dishonest?
Because?
I thought you weren’t an evolutionist. And it’s stupid, when applying that to human culture, given that culture has changed over time.
Why do you want culture to be magically static while wanting organisms to magically be able to genetically modify themselves?
Even dogs recognize unfairness. Why are you dumber than a dog?
So you say. Have you tried the hardness test yet? It’s easy.
Stoic philosophers were persecuted and expelled by believers in the Bible.
Ok let me give you an exercise. Take your hands and hold one out flat. keep your arm down but bring up your fore arm till your fingers point to the ceiling? got it? Ok, now while keeping index and middle touching and pinkie and ring fingers the same separate middle from ring finger? keep your thumb out stretch? Ok got it? Now take that salute and shove it up your ass
That has not been the evolutionary view for at least 50 years, if not closer to a hundred, not since the importance of symbiosis in evolution had been discovered.
Yeah? Well there are very many ways of cutting jade. Perhaps you should photograph or scan the certificate that was issued to you when you bought the piece and I can send you a translation. Do you even know what it is you were buying in the first place?
/cue_monty_python’s_hungarian_dictionary_sketch
Sadly for you, texpip, you do not practice this. Indeed you have not shown the slightest hint of even knowing anything at all about how to do this.
All that you have managed to demonstrate is how to deny yourself the boon of being RAISED UP by words, to be taught by the words of others, to absorb wisdom from the words of others, to gain insight through the words of others, to GROW, in knowledge, in wisdom, and in decency.
And that is why you reveal yourself to be so pitiful and weak, your mentality so stunted, your soul so shriveled. You huddle in terror behind a sappy, weak, useless worldview, afraid to expose yourself to the wonder and enormity of actual reality, afraid of opening yourself to the gloriousness of human diversity, afraid that it will make you feel small.
And in so doing you fulfill the prophecy. You MAKE yourself small, puny, shrunken, shriveled, bent, warped, pathetic. You puff your chest, strut with false bravado, but all who look can see through your sick, decaying facade. You are hollow and empty. You crumble with the faintest breeze.
txpiper:
Culture not only CAN be changed, it has been and continues to change. Your thinking (such as it is, because you continue to show poor critical thinking or analytical skills) is so narrow and unsophisticated.
You are deep in the heart of wrong.
To me cultural changes are ubiquitous.
Of great personal importance is the acceptance and even support for queer people in the US. It happened over time and in ways big and small.
Cultural attitudes towards Afrcan-Americans changed and now they can drink of the same fountain as a white person.
Racial slurs are no longer socially acceptable.
Voting? Can you believe women were unable to vote here in the US?
The acceptance of people with body piercings or tattoos continue.
Attitudes toward sex have changed.
The US elected a black President.
Interracial marriage is accepted.
Attitudes toward corporal and capital punishment have changed.
It is socially acceptable to live with your longtime SO.
Conventions have harassment policies and procedures.
Various online communities, have changed and are more welcoming to marginalized groups.
More people are identifying as Non believers.
More and more people have been persuaded that gender roles are articial, limited, and help maintain an unfair stutus quo
Normal, real, legitimate jade with the outside polished looks exactly like that. You still have provided no legitimate reason to conclude that piece was anything but real jade, of indeterminate quality.
So get it appraised, or withdraw your claim.
If so, then why do you insist on using them? You have vomited out nothing but gross distortions from the beginning of your time here.
Isn’t it funny how the texpip remains in such a tizzy about that piece of jade?
He bought it of his own free will. The Free Market at work in its purest form. It was his responsibility as a consumer to properly educate himself about his purchases. If he hadn’t taught himself how to recognize real jade on sight and touch, then he has no one but himself to blame.
Where’s the personal responsibility?
Or was he expecting there to be, you know, government regulation of the market to protect consumers from being cheated by unscrupulous fake jade merchants?
Pathetic hypocrite.
And it is particularly true of human evolution. That cooperation between individuals has been FUNDAMENTAL to human evolution has been known almost from the very beginning of the field.
And thus we see yet another distortion from the texpip.
So why did you do it, texpip, if it was unnecessary, you pitiful liar?
txpiper:
Who has cautious metaphorical language? Scientists are cautious, because science doesn’t deal in absolute proofs, but how are they metaphorical? Are you the one making metaphors out of serious scientific concepts?
Why, with that attitude, are you here haranguing us? Why, with that attitude, do you live?
Now, see, that isn’t the evolutionary view at all. You’ve just metaphorized from a non-scientific remark someone once made, to an ironclad overlying wrongness.
Most of nature doesn’t even have teeth or claws. The predators who do, are in the minority of even their ecosystems. By nature.
You really don’t pay attention to anything we say here, do you?. “Wrong” has been covered many times. Even if Nature were red in tooth and claw, we humans don’t have to be anarchistic animals. Accepting that evolution happens does not require anything else. Evolution is not a religion, and your belief about “evolutionists” is a very religious belief … which is to say it is wrong.
Well, he can die with honor, for what he believes.
Or he can do his best and think it through afterward. Perhaps killing himself honorably.
Again, you misunderstand, assume and exaggerate, then posit a rare case as a gotcha. Because you can’t imagine.
Or possibly Wikipedia’s. It might be a white jade, dyed green. Maybe that passes as a metaphorical jade. Maybe.
Why are we talking about the jade you bought, anyhow? Is it a metaphor for how you can be fooled? Are we looking for one weakness in your ego? If we prove you were tricked in one thing, will you crumble into a heap? Or are you trying to show that nobody can be trusted? I’d say buying bad jade is a lot less of a problem than buying into a bad religion.
(For what it’s worth, I have some 1700s Spanish silver coins I got in Indonesia that turn out to be Chinese-made fakes from the 1700s, used in Asian trade. I value them even more, now that I know that.)
Is that why you never learn from any words you read here? You really do not read for shit, as I have often said.
The “easily taken down” shit is another one of your confusions. The people that have been mentioned here are not collapsing in sobbing heaps when someone whispers a taboo term, they are stepping up to defend the right, and to prevent wrongs from continuing.
But you don’t understand that, do you, Tex? You imagine weakness, and that’s all you read. Your contempt is truly disgusting, and is part of the wrongness in the world.
You do not understand that some people have taken abuse from people like you all their lives, and that some are indeed at the edge of collapse, thanks to you. You are what is wrong, their suffering is the result of your wrongness.
But the people here, like Tony and many others, are stepping up to try to stop you and the people like you and the harms that you cause. And sadly, you have made it clear that nothing honorable will stop you, or change you, or even help you.
All your world is dark and violent, and you bring that darkness here.
Go away.
Get better.
Or, if you must stay here, listen and learn.
I’ve got nothing to say myself, but I really just feel like saying how awesome the responses have been to txpiper’s latest spew so far. Pitch perfect, as far as I am concerned.
That “sticks and stones” mantra has always seemed odd to me. The point of it is supposed to be that words can’t make you feel bad, but saying the words of it to someone is supposed to make them feel better.
It is instantly demonstrating that words can change your emotional state, by saying that they can’t.
Or maybe it is supposed to be a life lesson for later processing. That’s what I tell my brain to keep it from exploding.
And, as usual, if it is trite, simpler and it rhymes, a lot of people think it is it is worth basing their life on.
Menyambal:
I’m glad you mentioned txpiper’s madlib version of the story I related.
For some reason when I say:
I called a black man ‘boy’. He did not like being called ‘boy’ and asked me not to refer to him like that again. I apologized and said I would not do it again.
Txpiper hears:
I called someone a word they didnt like, which caused them to collapse sobbing in tears because their happiness is dependent on how they are perceived by others
Note that txpiper tries to retcon my experience through distortion.
Also note the similarities between our resident Asswitgot’s. All three are quick with the assertions, distort the words of others, and argue from personal bigotry, rather than facts based on evidence. Truly pathetic and the perfect illustration of the emptiness of their beliefs.
apropos: http://xkcd.com/1216/
As we all know, words have power. What was the point of humans inventing language at all, if not for that?
Or to take a metaphor that the texpip at least thinks he understands, what was the point of the myth of Babel? Or even the very first line of John (the texpip’s very favorite New Testament book, too): “In the beginning was the WORD. And the WORD was with God. And the WORD WAS GOD.”?
Words have power. The ultimate power, according to the texpip’s very own bible.
And the texpip is afraid of that power. He thinks he can make himself strong by ignoring the power of words. But that power does not go away just because he pretends it isn’t there.
Far from making himself strong, he makes himself weak. He is a coward. A small, simpering, pitiful coward, hiding from the power of words, running away from the obligation to take personal responsibility for that which he creates with the power of his own words.
@ Menyambal
Indeed.
Whatever springs first to mind is granted more relevance than it should. Cognitive ease is the measure of all, rather than rational consideration of the facts. This is sadly the way our brains are wired. Conscious thought is difficult, slow and tiresome and to be avoided at all costs.
No wonder StevoR conjures up a world view filled with racial and cultural stereotypes, and Bush era bogey’s. Or annejones clings to the goddist bigotry she was indoctrinated in. Or txpiper functions by reflexively clutching at the jaded prejudices swirling about in his head.
Conscious thinking, skepticism and science, is hard work. Maintaining the narrative (however broken) is so much easier. That part of our minds never switches off. It always beckons us to relax, to lie down in our fluffy warm intuitions and let our reasoning gently snooze.
Dang, annejones was using that blatantly false narrative of the case as well? Man, the bigots must be super happy that an irresponsible biological mother broke court orders regarding her kid and ex-wife. Else they’d never have a story they could try to twist into their preferred narrative. I mean, that still doesn’t make this that narrative, but now they can try, bless their hearts.
SteveOR still needs to fuck his little racist ass off. TXpiper too, although the latter at least puts vaguely more amusing displays of stupidity on display. Probably because they’re more genericaly evil and less inherently racist. Still really fucking racist, and not really amusing at all, though.
“the texpip remains in such a tizzy about that piece of jade?”
Good gosh. It’s a freakin knick-knack.
Gee, either show yourself to be small and ignorant by talking about how you were cheated, or shut the fuck up about it and everything else. You are wrong. Live with it.
@Annejones
What about families where the parents are divorced but still amicable, the father still sees the child regularly, and the mother has remarried? Does that child not have two “father roles”? Or if the the same situation is reversed, and the father remarries? Does that child not have two “mother roles”? Or what if both parents remarry? Now that child has 2 “mother roles” and two “father roles”! Does God hate them too?
As usual, your bullshit pseudoarguments fall apart after a seconds thought.
Also, are you ever planning on answering my post at #524? Or did that not give you enough opportunity for empty, evidenceless rhetoric?
@619
Oh, yes.
That cognitive bias has its own wiki page!
By the way…
This is not true.
I know tons of people who are eligible for benefits who won’t take them if they can keep themselves afloat any other way. Some of them explicitly say they do it so more money is available for those who need it. My own grandmother refuses aid regularly.
I suspect you all know people like that.
Txpiper will only believe the worst of people. He believes they are all money-grubbing selfish animals who will take advantage of you every time.
He has to. If people aren’t by nature the worst things possible, then they don’t need a god.
What’s the matter, txpip? Worried about how we think of you? It should be a matter of indifference to you whether we think you’re upset about the jade.
Jade is now “knick knacks”? txpiper, the more you comment, the more my estimation of you plummets.
Just bye-the-bye, this is what jade looks like: Pic of the Phontes’s Jade Collection. You will notice the certification tags. They also come with full certificates. (Which, disconcertingly, I cannot seem to find.) They look something like: this pic.
Yeah, certification. What the Chinese government instituted in order to enhance consumer protection and protect the jade industry (not least from disparaging and demeaning trolls, it appears).
You have already contradicted yourself. If money is only a medium of immediate exchange, people wouldn’t have to worry about losing their life savings due to changes in monetary value–only the value of loans & interest would matter. How do I know loans are a measure of future monetary commitment?…because they are measured in $$$. From here, it’s trivial to establish that loans & interest affect the value of money.
And yet you were the one who saw it fit to bring it up.
That someone might be angry enough to spew out racist stereotypes in ignorance over something that he thought was big and important is at least understandable.
But YOU apparently are the kind of person who thinks a “freakin knick-knack” is sufficient cause for making a racist joke.
Disgusting hypocrisy.
The texpip projects his own sociopathy onto others.
Notice how the texpip responds to the throwaway comment about the joke, and ignores all the other substantive replies to all his other fappery?
What’s the word for a person like that again?
Oh yes, good gosh, that’s it!
Coward.
Actually, this makes a certain amount of sense. It explains why txpiper does not allow hir views to be affected in any way by anything anybody has said to…hir(?)…hem(?)…(insert correct and matching gender-neutral personal pronoun).
Clearly, (pronoun) is only here to enjoy a good wank. Metaphorically speaking. It certainly can’t be for intercourse.
–
Because all contemporary cultures are just alike, and are just like the cultures of 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 10,000 years ago.
In fact, “culture” cannot correctly be pluralized. There Can Be Only One.
</sarcasm>
Cultures evolve. Shocking, I know.
–
So, what you’re saying is that txpiper may have bought a hovercraft full of eels that was misrepresented as jade?
–
… does txpiper realise that words have meanings?
Ah, the reliable ignorance and stupidity of the creationist. The phrase comes from the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poem was completed in 1849. Darwin and Wallace published their seminal paper on evolution through natural selection in 1858. The evolution of cooperation and altruism has been a major theme in evolutionary theory for the past half-century.
Free-associating a bit:
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can—
—undercut a child’s sense of self-worth—
—destroy someone’s reputation and future prospects—
—redefine a group of people as Other Than People—
—persuade a nation to go to war over non-existent WMDs—-”
What is “The Pen is mightier than the Sword” but a concession that words are potentially more damaging than physical violence?
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words don’t leave a mark where it shows.”
–
And good gosh, the texpip was eager to respond back there. It was almost, like, he CARED about what people were saying about him.
txpiper
txpiper
txpiper
“Your lies have killed far more than my bullets” I believe was the paraphrase from the Xfiles
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LawfulStupid
Seriously… stop pretending to yourself that you understand what you’re talking about.
Look around yourself and watch a culture change.
Look here, scroll down to the 20/20 Hindsight Appendix for 2002, and notice a few more things you may not have thought of (though most of the points in that list aren’t about culture).
As for “nature red in tooth & claw”, that’s not even half of what’s really going on. Learn about kin selection, and then about the evolution of reciprocal altruism. Nature is not Lawful Evil as you seem to imagine, nature is not even True Neutral (read the third paragraph).
Depends on the situation…?
Worst example:
Wo man singt, da lass dich ruhig nieder,
böse Menschen haben keine Lieder!
“Where there’s singing, feel free to settle,
evil people don’t have any songs!”
There’s a hadith that says “the scholars’ ink is more precious than the martyrs’ blood”. Unfortunately it’s probably fake.
There’s that bit in Pratchett’s The Light Fantastic that adds “unless the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp”.
^unless^if
*goodnight*
/collapses
But if it’s believed at all it sort of proves our hypothesis
“Learn about kin selection, and then about the evolution of reciprocal altruism.”
I’ve read lots of articles that try to account for altruism, and reconcile it with evolutionary beliefs. The various ideas are like origins of the moon stories.
Chigau:
Once txpiper and annejones are done celebrating their respective victories over the Groupthink Hivemind, he will return.
Aww, poor wittle txpiper dropped the “reciprocal”!
What a compliment, considering that there has been one major hypothesis for the moon’s origin, created 70 or years ago and popular for the last 30. I mean, sure, there are definitely less contentious areas of science, but it could also certainly be worse.
Menyambal,
“I have some 1700s Spanish silver coins I got in Indonesia that turn out to be Chinese-made fakes from the 1700s, used in Asian trade.”
Perhaps you should call them “reproductions”.
Is there any rhyme or reason to what the pip deigns fit for his most esteemed and regal of responses? It seems like the pip just randomly chooses one sentence out of dozens (or hundreds), gives a short, snide half-answer, and then temporarily crawls back under a rock. It’s an M.O. that reeks of Troll. As in, blatant, intentional, “I’m doing it for the lulz” kind of Troll.
(If anyone doubts the power of my perceptive abilities, I composed 650 before seeing 649. Am I a prophet yet?)
Speak of the devil…
I note that that the WikiP article says that jade can be enhanced with surface waxing, polymer resin, or artificial staining or dying. It can also be a composite.
I don’t know if one or more of the above explains your piece, but there it is.
Actually, it’s a demonstration of the problems with epistemology that you have, in a nutshell.
You claim to have something which you thought was jade, and which you no longer think is jade because it got chipped, and the inside is white. So now you think it is “phony”.
What made you think it was jade in the first place? Was it actually labeled as such? Were you told that it was jade verbally?
Why are you unwilling to perform the simple hardness test?
Why are you unwilling to have it appraised by an expert?
So?
Do you think the moon is a hoax?
Do you think that altruism is phony, like your chipped knick-knack?
His first comment, in 2006, as Phil Corn, in response to seeing people saying nice things about Charles Darwin, and Downe House, was:
He’s always been snide.
Txpip is a liberturd. Nothing but selfishness, like dishonesty, all the way down….
We should call him Snidely Piplash.
” Or even the very first line of John (the texpip’s very favorite New Testament book, too): “In the beginning was the WORD. And the WORD was with God. And the WORD WAS GOD.”?”
First, how would you know if John is my favorite book? But this verse is not about a word. It is about a Person, who is the word. The same thing holds for truth. The Person is the truth. “I am the truth….”.
”He is a coward. A small, simpering, pitiful coward, hiding from the power of words…”
Who is hiding? Who bans?
Ray Bans.
(Okay, I need some work, but I will simulate Piplash’s commenting style yet!)
Does it not bother you that your very next sentence contradicts the prior one?
Does it not bother your that the foundation of your religion is fundamentally semantic nonsense?
“A person is a word” is a category mistake.
“A person is the truth” is an even worse category mistake.
You might as well say “rhubarb giraffe is vertical quintessence”.
And the texpip criticizes evolutionary theory for employing metaphorical language. But when his bible does it, it is suddenly alright.
Pathetic hypocrisy all the way down.
Sometimes reality is like an origin of the moon story. And why shouldn’t it be? The moon is real and has an origin.
Live with it, texpip.
Speaking of altruism, what evolutionary theory explains very well is why we observe a mixture of altruistic and selfish behavior in living things.
In comparison, the explanation for this observation that texpip’s sad, sappy, useless creationism attempts to give is pitiful in its trite asininity.
Kudos to the texpip for once again bringing yet another example of how evolutionary theory is so superior to his utterly worthless creationism.
E PUR SI EVOLVES, texpip.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6960/abs/nature02043.html
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2822435?uid=3739472&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21102532958293
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/127/2/187/
This is reality. Live with it.
“evolutionary theory explains very well is why we observe a mixture of altruistic and selfish behavior in living things”
I am confident that it does. No limits, nothing too complex…nothing too absurd. A unique theory that cannot fail, above and beyond the bounds of falsifiability.
“Who bans?”
Really?
Go ahead and answer your own question.
Not terribly nice to our host…
And what the fuck is that word salad at #656? You strung words together in the semblance of a sentence but it makes zero sense. Your god is The word. Which one? Your god is a person, just a different kind of person than any of the persons who walked this planet. Butbthen your god is also an abstract concept. Wait, scratch that. I forgot “god is Truth and Love”, except all the times she is petty, vicious and genocidal.
Again with the lies, texpip. Falsifying evolution should be easy-peasey. Simply produce evidence that populations of living things don’t undergo changes over the course of many generations.
That is your inane and fuckwitted creationism, with your imaginary unevidenced deity base on a book of mythology fiction. Don’t you comprehend anything? It’s almost like your brain stopped working when your imaginary deity arrived….
Since a word is just sequence of noises that a group of people has more or less agreed can be used to convey some sort of information, and a written word is just a bunch of squiggles that people have more or less agreed stand for the sequence of noises, a word being God would make God a pretty negligible thing. Not omni-anything at all, really.
That’s hardly fair to the pipster. They can’t help it if their religion is entirely composed of bafflegab!
(Well, they can, but that would involve abandoning that particular flavor of bafflegab. And it is too delicious to quit!)
“What is Creationism, Trebek?”
“No, I’m sorry. Creationism does occasionally fall within the realm of falsibility, and has been falsified on many counts. Pick again.”
“Alright, I’ll take Jesus-flavored Bafflegab for $800.”
Distortions, again? You do like being dishonest.
In addition to being dishonest, I’m pretty sure you have no idea what “falsifiable” means.
But it’s THE word. THE! So it’s, like, a super word. The noise to end all noises. The definition upon which all other definitions derive. The enormity of the universe confined into the most perfect syllables ever uttered during the course of time itself. It is…
Power Word: Jesus! (Sorc/Wiz 11*)
*Epic level spells all count as level 10 spells no matter, meaning that Power Word: Jesus works in mysterious ways! (Also, it goes up to 11)
In that case, God in our house is Tiramisu.
I GAVE YOU THE LINKS you poor, sappy specimen.
What was that word again that describes an idiot who tries to be snide when the links that prove him wrong are RIGHT THERE?
Golly gosh, it’s just on the tip of my tongue…
Ah, there it is.
PATHETIC.
It’s the one you quote the most and praise the most when quoting from it.
Oh, are you saying that it is not your favorite book?
Are you finally admitting that you are a liar, then?
Have you finally realized what a pitiable display of dishonesty you have produced?
Welcome to reality.
Live with it.
In other words, it is about a WORD.
Thank you for conceding the point.
And thank you for conceding the original point too, that words have power.
This is the 1st Anniversary of the Thunderdome and the Lounge.
@chigau:
*confetti*
YHWH Elohim, of course.
You know, I realize that it can come as something as a rude shock when the owner of a site charges in and starts telling you where you can post, and starts limiting what you can post, and threatens you with banning if you continue posting certain things, especially since you’ve posted for years without seeing any complaints.
It’s probably even more annoying when the thread header reads “Say what you want, how you want.” How unfair!
But you’re kind of taking for granted that posting whatever you want is a right, rather than a privilege.
It’s always been a privilege.
And if that privilege is revoked — if you get banned — you won’t be out a single penny, nor will you sustain any physical injury.
Your feelings may be hurt because you feel unfairly snubbed and rejected, but I’m sure you’ll get over it.
And you can continue posting your annoying assholish nonsense in other forums. Maybe you can even write a book or two: “Evolution: I don’t buy it”, and “Christianity: True because of course God would scatter prophecy in these fragments of verses here and there through various books of the Old Testament”. And how about: “Liberals deserve bad things because liberals are bad and liberal policy is bad policy and argh! I hate liberals”
You’ll be fine.
Individual evolutionary hypotheses are falsified all the time, and replaced with different evolutionary hypotheses.
Every single experiment ever done in evolutionary science could have produced results that would have falsified the entirety of evolutionary theory, but did not.
They have not done so because the reality is that evolutionary theory in its broad outline is true.
Live with it.
@txpiper #656
If it’s about a person who is the word, then it’s about the word, isn’t it? Think it through.
*please note: the last three words of the above post are to be read in a world-weary tone of extreme exasperation*
@myeck waters #666
congratulations on grabbing The Devil’s Own Comment #
I feel honour-bound to point out that this whole claptrap about God being “The Word” and The Word is God, is a bunch of half understood relics left over from the early days of Xianity. “The Word” was a way of referring to the Bible (presumably short for God’s Word, it being the word of God and all) and the many phrases alluding to God being The Word and The Word being God is a jumbled up metaphor referring to the idea that the Babble is inviolable because it is God’s word.
It’s just as nonsensical as the rest of xianity, and less well known than most, so most Xians (the texpip apparently being included in that number) don’t understand it.
tl;dr
“The Word” = the Babble; you are to follow the Babble in all things, because it was written by God and therefore is a true representation of His wishes and whims; therefore “The Word” is, in practice, God.
Agreed Owlmirror! For all the various ways that Jesus/God wish to limit acceptable behavior, and with all the power she/he/it/they supposedly have to enforce it, txpiper complaining about a single human limiting his ability to post his views freely on a small corner of the Internet is epically missing the picture. Epically. By every measure considered.
Thumper:
Sooooo…if The Word=the bible and The Word=god, then god=bafflegab?
Sorry, but no. That was amphiox.
Later today I head of to South Africa¹. Callooh! Callay! I can switch off the English Language Module ™ and live off a diet of pap-en-wors. (My destination: Phontes’s home appears in 0:30 here: Link video.)
……..
¹ For the goddists: South Africa is a country where the government issues certificates for iron pyrite (FeS²) as if it’s gold. Also, shattered glass is certificated as diamonds ™ . All to pull the wool over good xtian eyes. Surely this is an indication of the end times!
The poor, poor texpip probably also doesn’t realize that In Memoriam was a religiously themed poem espousing Christian ideals, and that Tennyson was most likely using that phrase as a metaphor for the fallen world set in contrast with God’s original intent. The whole stanza is as follows:
The phrase is a reference to creationism’s attempt to explain the reality of conflict in nature, and in mocking it, the texpip only manages to highlight just how ridiculous and useless the creationist view on the matter really is.
It would appear that the texpip is as wilfully ignorant about literature as he is about everything else.
No, the bird is the word.
Can’t believe no one’s pointed that out yet.
@ Rey
Yohyoh,yoh,… Imma gonna flip TEH WORD the frikkin’ bird!
(What happened to comic sans?)
frikkin’flippen … wahtevah!AnneJones, the only person with a warped view of gender is you. You really are a terrible person.
To be fair epic level wizards do get spell slots up above 9. They’re only usable for doing Metamagic boosts to lower level spells. Since the modern Jesus is a hodge-podge of mythology, literature, and apologetics built atop older myths I think Power Word: Jesus would work fine as a 4th level spell with a bunch of crummy metamagic feats slapped onto it.
I always thought all the stuff about “THE WORD” was leftover gnostism. If you knew the Gnostic secrets you could ascend above the fallen world and escape the Demiurge’s grasp.
Speaking of which TxPiper why do you not believe in gnostic christianity? Why do you reject that Jesus came to Earth to free you from the wicked grasp of Ialdabaoth, the misbegotten child of Sophia the divine wisdom? Why do you refuse to grant worship to the true goddess over the foolish fallen god?
And they are functionally equivalent to Wish spells—the kind that djinn can do three of per day, not the watered-down travesty available to the gods’ meatpuppets.
–
Happy Threadiversary, all!
*fireworks&confetti&booze&cake*
–
@ omnicrom
I’ll concede that there are many who think of the gospel as second rate LOTR fairytales. On the other hand, we should keep in mind that the shit they were making up at the time was quite unique. At least for those times.
Oh wait. I’m wrong. The fairytales are not even original.
In the spirit of this anniversary, I am in a giving mood.
To StevoR:
To txpiper:
Heck, I am feeling jolly! You can have the whole thing:
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs.html
Just so the remaining third of our reality denying trio does not feel unappreciated, this lustful cockmonster gives to you:
These gifts are freely given and in spite of the snark, it is hoped that through exposure to and a proper understanding of accurate statistics and/or information regarding:
annejones
Apologies. I forgot to name you as the third recipient of my gift. You have the apologies of one Lustful Cockmonster, M.D.
Aaaand forgot to close the tag…razzum frazzummm
@ Tony
Methinks annejones would be rather suprised if she ever met us in person. From what I’ve seen, you are a better male role model than I have ever been. My daughter has turned out rather well, in spite of myself. I am very sure that you will make an excellent father.
On the other hand … I am rather sure that she will make a truly awful parent.
I really really hate the psuedo blood magic woo of the supremacy of bio parents.
Random aside that makes me peevish:
I know someone in meatspace who is named Anne Jones. She is the farthest you could be from the commenter.
And I feel as if I must protest in the name of all good, decent, honorable people named Anne Jones.
Yeah. That’s the kind of thing that sounds really profound when you’re in the thralls of a religious ecstasy.
Or high.
Say the magic word and Jesus’ll fly down and give you a hundred dollars?
/groucho’d
So the religion that believes it’s god is The Word and it’s devil is the Father of Lies doesn’t believe in the power of words and speech?
I don’t think this is quite right. The Logos theology found in John and alluded to elsewhere in the NT, I think, associates Gr. logos (“word, utterance”) with pre-existence, specifically as integral to the act of Creation, in which God speaks, (“Let there be light” etc.) and thus effects creation. The Bible, or more correctly just “scripture” since there was no universally accepted canon of texts even as late as the 1st century, was much more commonly called the Law (Gr. nomos) or referred to as “the law and the prophets”.
Incidentally, the whole Logos–>Word of God–>Power of creation business has its ultimate origin in ANE royal propaganda: The King speaks and his will is done. Power itself was regarded as a kind of magic.
@CJO
I agree that it’s not obvious that the logos should refer to the bible specifically. The “word of creation” seems more likely. That seems to tie in with pre-trinitarian ideas about Christ not being one part of the trinity, but instead being first among the created beings; the vessel through which everything else was created. This has more in common with the theology of non-trinitarian Christian sects, like the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist “Starting Tonight, People will Whine”
I’m very much enjoying Michael Peppard’s The Son of God in the Roman World.
He makes a very good case for adoption not being considered a lesser form of relation to the Romans and compares the batism of Christ to the adoptions of the Roman emperors.
Only thing I’ve missed him talking about so far is adoption is modern Japan, which I gather works much the same way: Adopt a grown man to get a superior heir for your company.
Oh, that goes only for GMark of course.
It makes a lot more sense than nepotism of monarchies or the like. And a bit of making sense to build a family or tribe based on actual affection or allegiance rather than accident of birth.
It of course also makes evopsyche people eat their own anus in rage.
I’m going to call it now: Richard Dawkins will be named.
Or, on a much lower tier: Justin Vacula will be named.
If I’m right, will txpiper THEN accept my prophetic powers? If not, why not.
Hmm…why does whacky-backy keep coming to mind????
News!! The dark box of mystery which has lived in the attic, lo these many years, has been opened … *dum dum dummmmm* … and I have been reunited with my stomp boxes! Boss DS-2 in the house. I was smart enough to take the batteries out before they went into storage. If you want to know how long ago that was, let me just say that one had a best-before date of June 1999. It’s been a while.
Also, whilst I knew I bought my DOD FX60 in San Francisco, it took the receipt to remind me that I’d bought it on my birthday!
In 1990.
*sob*
—
Of course, the main prize within was my guitar (yay! a non-standard RG-760 with a C1 front pickup and a two-piece neck that’s as thin as a fricking katana).
However, the shine has been taken off our reunion by the fact that Kid #1 and mrs cm restrung it with a pack of Rotosounds containing a spare first string. Yes, you guessed it, it now has two first strings and the rest of the pack apart from the sixth, which has disappeared. *glum* They also managed to dislocate the Edge, but that’s sorted now.
Anyway, here’s to reunions and anniversaries! To the guitar-string shop! *dramatic exit*
In The Beginning there was the Word and the Word was
“Abracadabra”
And an illusion was revealed. Yep, fakery, all the way down.
”considering that there has been one major hypothesis for the moon’s origin…”
There have been others, but none have really worked out. Not long ago, I read not long ago about how the current favorite is not very good either. I’ll see if I can find the article.
===
”It’s the one you quote the most and praise the most when quoting from it.”
I don’t recall quoting from John, or praising it the most. owlmirror keeps meticulous records…maybe he can clear this up.
Science, presenting and ruling out alternative hypotheses!? Unheard of!? Something must be amiss!
We trust and value your opinion on the subject, given your clearly demonstrated scientific acumen and credentials in the past.
;) *leaves off a tankard of grog*
“Science, presenting and ruling out alternative hypotheses!? Unheard of!? Something must be amiss!”
Something definitely is. The ruling out part tends not to happen at all till there is something less stupid to cling to.
Yes by definition science uses the explanation that best fits the available evidence. When a better explanation is developed it fits better. See how that works?
And of course, a much stupider theory for the moon’s existence is that it was poofed into existence about 6,000 years ago, simultaneously with the sun and the stars.
Much stupider indeed.
You basically said “the keys are always in the last place you looks” Yes you idiot because when you find them you’re done looking. Old ideas are only replaced by “less stupid ones” because before that every other idea was MORE stupid.
Jesus Fuckstick VonCHrist!
There is nothing more stupid than your imaginary deity based on a book of mythology/fiction. There is no less stupid explanation availble. It is rock bottom in idiocy. Which is why you can’t prove a damn thing, or sound semi intellectual. It is dishonesty and stupidity all the way down.
“Why you dishonest scientists and your jumpin’ from one hypothesis to another, all promiscuous! Takin’ any hot new hypothesis that comes along! Takin’ any hypothesis as long as it makes slightly more sense than the last one! And it doesn’t contradict evidence! Have you no shame! In my day, we took one hypothesis and we stuck with it! No, it didn’t matter what evidence came along. No, it didn’t matter if someone came across brand sparklin’ new hypothesis! It didn’t matter if there were plenty of other hypotheses out there that weren’t nearly as stupid as ours! And it certainly didn’t matter if the facts contradicted our hypothesis! We kept their hypothesis until we were on deathbeds! We praised that hypothesis until our dying breath! Do you young ones even know what it is to love a hypothesis anymore? To really love it? To love an idea so hard that you will ignore the entirety of reality just to support it? In my days, we knew. But with your newfangled science, you people will never know what it is to sincerely believe in something that everyone knows is nonsense! You never know the passion and commitment involved! Now git off my lawn!”
-Excerpt from “Gimme Me That Ol’ Time Religion” by Reverend Al Chemie and Dr. Geo Sentrism
You seem strangely eager to set the record straight on this. I thought you didn’t care what other people said about you.
Pathetic hypocrite.
Who is the less stupid, those who rule out things when something less stupid presents itself, or those like you, who cling like a dessicated remora to the most stupid thing of all and refuse to let go even when something MUCH less stupid is presented to you?
Who is less stupid, those who, without access to anything better, keep the ideas that they KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE work at least part of the time, even if they know it is not perfect, or those who, as you seem to be suggesting, throw out everything that is not perfect immediately, even when they have no alternative, and sit there twiddling their thumbs and drooling?
If you had known even a little bit of what you are talking about, you would have known that the “current favorite” is supported by a wide array of evidence and those who argue that it is “not very good” are a fringe minority whose views are not supported.
An honest person would have found the article first before fapping out the ridiculous claims that preceded this.
Of course we all know you are not an honest person.
Or perhaps you do have the article, but like all your other articles, it actually says the exact opposite of what you claim it does, and you are simply afraid, pitiful coward that you are, to post it and have yourself exposed once again for the pathetic piece of shit liar that you are.
And indeed, perhaps it was this article?
http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/moon-could-have-formed-earth-after-all-reviving-and-revising-giant-impact-theory
How typical of you to ignore that last two sections of it, which examines and reaffirms the currently favored giant impact theory.
Or perhaps it was this article?
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/moon_formation.html
Except of course even though it disputes the original giant impactor theory, it presents its own alternative theory which is still a form of giant impactor theory.
Or was it this article?
http://www.dailytech.com/New+Theories+Arise+to+Explain+Creation+of+the+Moon/article27981.htm
Except of course if one actually reads the WHOLE article, and not just the title and the first few paragraphs, as you always do, one would find that this is actually describing evidence that resolves a longstanding issue with the giant impactor theory and therefore actually SUPPORTS it.
And now that you have been so helpful as to bring up the subject of the moon, what does your poor, sappy, useless creationism say about it?
Oh dear. It appears your poor, pitiful creationism posits plants being created before the moon. It also seems to have failed to figure out that the moon is not a light at all, and that moonlight is just reflected sunlight. It also failed to figure out that the sun was created before the moon, not on the same day, and that many of the stars are even older than the sun. It also even failed to notice that the moon can be visible during the day. It couldn’t even figure out that the moon and the sun belong in different categories of objects, and instead lumps them both into the same category (what was the word for that again? kind?). It also failed to figure out that the moon has gravity and mass, just like the earth.
And to top it all off, your useless creationism doesn’t even provide an explanation for how the moon was formed at all. It just says god made them. It can’t even provide the vaguest detail about how he went about doing that.
What a sappy, sappy, useless and stupid idea.
And yet you cling, like lint on an unwashed sweater.
For anyone interested, our local Czech Atheist organisation notified the authorities about a local “moderate” imam promoting hatred of unbelief/nonbelievers and corporal punishment here. (Czech attorney: “To outlaw the entire Islamic association is bold, but not unrealistic”)
Thank you so very fucking much, National Geographic Channel. Just what was missing in my life, a reality show about snake handling pastors.
*mumbles something about an amish mafia*
@texpip
I fail to see how that counts as something being “amiss”…
You understand the implications of this for creationism and much of the claims of religions everywhere….
right?
Including most all of the ridiculously unsupported claims you’ve made here
Right?
You get it?
@Tony
That would be the logical conclusion of this thought-train (Choo! Choo!), yes :)
@Rey Fox
PMSL :)
@txpiper
Please, texpip, regale us with your understanding of the currently most widely accepted theory for the formation of the moon. This should be interesting :)
NEW THREAD.