blue squares posted:Is this where I go to talk about how my best friend, who is incredibly smart, thinks democracy is stupid and should be replaced by an authoritarian meritocracy? I thought every angsty nerd believed this as a teenager - that we should be ruled by philosopher kings selected by computers or eugenics.
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Oct 5, 2015 00:07
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Merdifex posted:Wesley's pretty pissed off over dirty commie prog William Gibson, but his reasons aren't very clear. Here's him frothing at the mouth over Gibson's supposed cultural marxism: Does anyone in that thread mention that flat design is popular because it's (comparatively, at least) cheap and easy to make look good at different sizes?
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Oct 5, 2015 03:06
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Count Chocula posted:I thought every angsty nerd believed this as a teenager - that we should be ruled by philosopher kings selected by computers or eugenics.
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Oct 5, 2015 05:37
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Count Chocula posted:I thought every angsty nerd believed this as a teenager - that we should be ruled by philosopher kings selected by computers or eugenics. If the invisible hand of the free market counts as an imaginary perfectly rational king then yes, this covers every single angsty nerd's teen years.
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Oct 5, 2015 07:54
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Wesley thinks that this article: http://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/news/1015-racism-and-sexism-in-heavy-metal-highlighted-in-new-study/ ...and this piece of poo poo: http://raggedjackscarlet.tumblr.com/post/130429459938/severnayazemlya-untiltheseashallfreethem-a ...are at all comparable. Which is interesting, to say the least.
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Oct 5, 2015 07:54
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:If the invisible hand of the free market counts as an imaginary perfectly rational king then yes, this covers every single angsty nerd's teen years. I dunno. This proposed future seems remarkably spotless and glowy translucent blue scifi, there doesn't seem to be an aesthetic left for recreating Cannibal Corpse album covers. Ronwayne has a new favorite as of 14:17 on Oct 5, 2015 |
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Oct 5, 2015 14:13
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Merdifex posted:Wesley thinks that this article: I think the second one gave me some kind of brain injury.  Isn't the apparent "simplicity" of smartphones part of their high tech image though? They're not supposed to be covered in buttons and wires and blinkenlights because the idea is that they do the nitty-gritty aspects of computing automatically, behind the scenes, and don't bother you with it, because the smartphone exists to allow people to do things, not to be some monument to computing. Trying to make it "awe-inspiring" would destroy its functionality. Woolie Wool has a new favorite as of 14:58 on Oct 5, 2015 |
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Oct 5, 2015 14:55
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Woolie Wool posted:I think the second one gave me some kind of brain injury. I think they ingrained the idea of high-tech from 15-20 years ago when it was all circuitboards and sprawling, awful flash websites and never updated their position as the world changed.
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Oct 5, 2015 17:07
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I would also like to point out that any thought that begins with the words "consider steampunk" can be immediately dismissed as stupid.
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Oct 5, 2015 17:08
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Heresiarch posted:"ClockGate" has been a thing on Twitter for a while now, even Dawkins got into the act. It's vile garbage but we knew that already. so what exactly is their angle(besides being bigots)? that he didn't "invent" the clock he only built one? that seems kinda of horrifically petty.
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Oct 5, 2015 23:49
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Dawkins, Sam Harris and co. Atheists got to the point where it became demonizing of the other and base tribalism.
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Oct 6, 2015 00:14
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Dapper_Swindler posted:so what exactly is their angle(besides being bigots)? that he didn't "invent" the clock he only built one? that seems kinda of horrifically petty.
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Oct 6, 2015 00:23
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Dapper_Swindler posted:so what exactly is their angle(besides being bigots)? that he didn't "invent" the clock he only built one? that seems kinda of horrifically petty. Basically they're saying that disassembling a mass-produced item and putting it in a different box is not that interesting, even for a kid, and nobody would be pretending to care if it weren't for the political angle. Which, while obviously true, neglects that the political angle is important. Personally I think they're mostly racists, but they might also be doing that nerd thing where they disclaim all politics as evil intruders in the noble life of the mind (except when doing so would disadvantage them).
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Oct 6, 2015 00:36
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SolTerrasa posted:Basically they're saying that disassembling a mass-produced item and putting it in a different box is not that interesting, even for a kid, and nobody would be pretending to care if it weren't for the political angle. Which, while obviously true, neglects that the political angle is important. He loving brought it into school to show it off, and then got in trouble because of idiots! The point of this story is not whether he's a genius! I realize you are not Dawkins and I'm yelling at thin air, but still.
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Oct 6, 2015 01:13
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Hello, I'm acclaimed
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Oct 6, 2015 01:14
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So it's just a bunch of nerds who are sore that no national news outlet ever reported on them bringing a homemade clock to school. Which strikes me as just another instance of the nerd-right getting upset over not having enough attention paid to them.
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Oct 6, 2015 01:15
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Being an atheist is fine, but it seems like Dawkins is just using it as cover to be a bigot at this point, if he's hopped on the Suspicious Clock train.
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Oct 6, 2015 01:23
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HEY GAL posted:dawkins believes muslims are incapable of invention My favorite was when people say Muslims "preserved the knowledge of the ancient Greeks", when the knowledge was often neither ancient nor Greek but poo poo they invented themselves. StandardVC10 posted:Being an atheist is fine, but it seems like Dawkins is just using it as cover to be a bigot at this point, if he's hopped on the Suspicious Clock train. Dawkins is a senile old bourgeois white man basking in a cult of personality. Nobody can hold him accountable for anything he says because he's surrounded by a bubble of syncophants.
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Oct 6, 2015 01:27
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SolTerrasa posted:Basically they're saying that disassembling a mass-produced item and putting it in a different box is not that interesting, even for a kid, and nobody would be pretending to care if it weren't for the political angle. Which, while obviously true, neglects that the political angle is important. We had an electronics class in my high school where we built phones and crystal radios from kits, took apart smoke detectors, etc. to further our educations. Not news worthy in and of itself, but a wonderful thing and something more schools ought to do, because understanding this stuff is important, and the class was actually rather difficult; soldering is tricky! I still don't understand everything I was taught, and barely got through it with a passing grade. A kid being able to do the stuff we did without supervision and of his own initiative, let alone modifying the project and adding in new specifications,is awesome and should be praised, not led out of handcuffs. Doesn't matter if he didn't mine the ore himself and then work the transistors into existence with his homemade furnace and dye. It's totally scrambling for any excuse not to praise the kid, and it stinks, especially considering the long and wonderful tradition of science in Islam...
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Oct 6, 2015 01:53
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StandardVC10 posted:Being an atheist is fine, but it seems like Dawkins is just using it as cover to be a bigot at this point, if he's hopped on the Suspicious Clock train. I want to say it's kind of like libertarianism vs. Libertarianism, but I don't want to insult atheists.  Woolie Wool posted:My favorite was when people say Muslims "preserved the knowledge of the ancient Greeks", when the knowledge was often neither ancient nor Greek but poo poo they invented themselves. TBF, many texts from Greece and Rome (among other civilizations) existed in the Islamic sphere, some of which were lost to the West. Though you are right that it's generally a fallacy meant to dismiss Muslims' contributions to science.
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Oct 6, 2015 02:55
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Don't forget some of Dawkins's greatest hits in his hardhitting questions aimed at the Muslim menace:
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Oct 6, 2015 03:14
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Dawkins also said over twitter that he was raped as a child and didn't think it was a big deal so all those women complaining about the same thing happening to them are just mentally weak.
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Oct 6, 2015 03:25
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Jack Gladney posted:Dawkins also said over twitter that he was raped as a child and didn't think it was a big deal so all those women complaining about the same thing happening to them are just mentally weak. Okay that I need a screenshot of, if only to show to my friends and 
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Oct 6, 2015 04:49
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when the gently caress did dawkins become a massive rear end in a top hat? i rember reading some his stuff years ago and thinking it was alright. Now he comes off trying to be the smartist dick ever and taking petty shots at people who probaly dont deserve it. it sounds like he is becoming the atheist equivalent of david irving. Edit. seems to me that alot of the big ahtiests shitheads(dawkins, hitchens) went full bugshit after 9/11. Dapper_Swindler has a new favorite as of 05:25 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 05:10
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Dapper_Swindler posted:when the gently caress did dawkins become a massive rear end in a top hat? i rember reading some his stuff years ago and thinking it was alright. Now he comes off trying to be the smartist dick ever and taking petty shots at people who probaly dont deserve it. it sounds like he is becoming the atheist equivalent of david irving. Woolie Wool posted:Dawkins is a senile old bourgeois white man basking in a cult of personality. Nobody can hold him accountable for anything he says because he's surrounded by a bubble of syncophants. Emphasis on the cult of personality.
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Oct 6, 2015 06:07
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Dick Dorkins drops Deep Thoughts. For your consideration...
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Oct 6, 2015 06:13
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MizPiz posted:TBF, many texts from Greece and Rome (among other civilizations) existed in the Islamic sphere, some of which were lost to the West. Though you are right that it's generally a fallacy meant to dismiss Muslims' contributions to science. And it's really not doing them justice to say that Muslim scientists and thinkers simply copied the texts either, they wrote extensive commentaries on those works. Although the Greek texts that were transmitted were generally of a medical nature (a large portion of the Galenic corpus was transmitted into Arabic from Syriac sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries as part of a tradition of courtly patronage for public hospitals which was likely undertaken to compete with similar Byzantine civic patronage) of the non-medical texts, one finds scientific texts (there is an 8th century Arabic translation of Euclid's 'Geometry' attributed to Al-Hajjaj) and philosophical treatises. Aristotle had particular cache in the Arab world, and Arab writers contributed to the philosophical tradition with extensive commentaries. Ibn Rushd's commentaries and his translations on and of the Aristotelean corpus was hugely influential on western thought. Arabic as a language was more accessible than Greek in the West during the middle ages (all through medieval copies of Greek texts you will find the Latin phrase "graecum est non legitur"/"it is Greek, it cannot be read" in the margins), and his work ended up fuelling the Aristotelean revival in Western Europe of the 12th and 13th centuries. That's important stuff, and has been largely excised from the popular consciousness after centuries of western imperialism, racism, orientalism, and colonialism. It's starting to change though, there are a lot more books being written about cross-cultural exchange between the Islamic and Christian worlds from the middle-ages through to the early modern period. Contemporary sources were fully aware of the Islamic influences (Ibn Rushd when Latinized is known as Averroes, he shows up in Raphael's "School of Athens"), it's rather a recent thing that this influence has been downplayed. Hellequin has a new favorite as of 06:42 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 06:38
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To give a rough idea of just how important it is, the very well regarded History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast devoted 75 episodes to covering medieval Islamic philosophy. Classical philosophy (Thales through Aristotle) only got 51, and late Antiquity (Epicurus through Boethius) received 67. Enjoy over at: http://historyofphilosophy.net/islamic-world
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Oct 6, 2015 07:01
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Toph Bei Fong posted:To give a rough idea of just how important it is, the very well regarded History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast devoted 75 episodes to covering medieval Islamic philosophy. Classical philosophy (Thales through Aristotle) only got 51, and late Antiquity (Epicurus through Boethius) received 67. This is really interesting, thanks for the link. I'm a classicist by training, any knowledge I have about mediaeval philosophy (Western or Islamic) is independent learning, so I appreciate it. It's a really cool subject. I wrote a lengthy and involved paper during my undergraduate years about Persian versions of the Alexander Romance, so I find cross-cultural exchanges fascinating. It's really rather sad just how myopic an understanding of history nearly all of NrX has. There's no attention to social or cultural history, everything these people know come straight from 19th century traditions of political/military history. That sort of short sightedness would appear to be the rule among amateur historians (especially those with STEM backgrounds) in my experience. In a way it makes sense, it does provide an easily digestible, linear narrative, free from any ambiguity. Hellequin has a new favorite as of 07:18 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 07:09
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The worst offender, of course, being that loving human progress chart.
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Oct 6, 2015 09:52
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Jack Gladney posted:Dawkins also said over twitter that he was raped as a child and didn't think it was a big deal so all those women complaining about the same thing happening to them are just mentally weak. Well he said he got "mildly touched up" by his teacher, not full-on raped, but yeah. Here's a link about it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/richard-dawkins-pedophilia_n_3895514.html So forcing religion on your kids IS child abuse, but literally sexually abusing them isn't, because hey, it doesn't do any "lasting harm" right??  He also tweeted the words "There are good Muslims" recently, which is course is the ultimate dawkins move because now he can claim people get angry when he says Muslims are bad AND when he says some are good e: and here's his defence of the pedophilia thing. Apparently to judge his sexual abuse as bad rather than just 'unpleasant' would have belittled the real victims, and would have been wrongly applying today's standards to the past. Prism Mirror Lens has a new favorite as of 12:25 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 12:12
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It's boggling the kind of mind that wants to argue that sexual abuse being bad is a modern concept.
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Oct 6, 2015 12:59
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Pope Guilty posted:It's boggling the kind of mind that wants to argue that sexual abuse being bad is a modern concept. In a way it is something of a modern concept. It's not normalised as it was in say, Classical Antiquity. I have no doubts that the institution of Greek pederasty was in many cases psychologically and emotionally harmful, but it was also seen as serving a necessary social function (i.e. the social education of young men). Even as recently as this past century institutionalised sexual abuse was partially normalised (think to the English educational system and the practice of "fagging"). Dawkins is completely indefensible in his position, however, and it reveals him for the dinosaur he is. It's a good thing these things are seen as abhorrent, and we can likely thank a lot of feminist thinkers for that development.
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Oct 6, 2015 13:17
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It was also "normalized" in the sense that nobody talked about it. There's still debate going on (I think) about whether Freud abandoned "seduction theory" because of the difficulty of accusing huge swathes of Victorian-era society of child sexual abuse, forcing him to claim that his patients' stories of abuse were the product of sexual fantasies (re: "Oedipus complex") and not actual truth. Taking stories of childhood sexual abuse seriously is very much a product of the 20th century, like so many other things that might run contrary to the desires of the male heads of households (or state).
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Oct 6, 2015 13:52
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Dapper_Swindler posted:when the gently caress did dawkins become a massive rear end in a top hat?  He was always a massive rear end in a top hat
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Oct 6, 2015 14:29
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Hellequin posted:Ibn Rushd's commentaries and his translations on and of the Aristotelean corpus was hugely influential on western thought. Arabic as a language was more accessible than Greek in the West during the middle ages (all through medieval copies of Greek texts you will find the Latin phrase "graecum est non legitur"/"it is Greek, it cannot be read" in the margins), and his work ended up fuelling the Aristotelean revival in Western Europe of the 12th and 13th centuries. That's important stuff, and has been largely excised from the popular consciousness after centuries of western imperialism, racism, orientalism, and colonialism. I never really understood this. Greece wasn't that far away, and while they might have been a bunch of filthy heretics by medieval Catholic standards, they were a hell of a lot closer to Catholicism than Islam was.
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Oct 6, 2015 14:39
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There are a few reasons for it. One has to do with the changes in the Greek language, the Attic Greek of Aristotle or Plato is fairly far removed from the post-Koine Greek of the middle ages. You have to remember that there is a nearly two thousand year period of time between the heydey of Classical Athens in the 5th century BCE and the 12th century renaissance. By that time the entire optative mood is dropped from the Greek that was being spoken, and a great many of the more subtle (some might say superfluous) grammatical complexities have been smoothed out. And there are also just those weird changes in the meanings of words. Yes, an uninterrupted Classical curricula continued to be taught at Byzantine universities from Late Antiquity well into the time of Psellos, and students studied many of the same texts that had been studied for hundreds of years, but command of Attic was increasingly the purview of a select few specialists. You even find that as time goes on Byzantine commentaries on ancient texts shift from more comprehensive analysis of the text's themes to almost purely philological and linguistic commentaries, it is obvious that those with a strong grasp of Attic have become increasingly scarce. There is also the simple reality that the Roman world had always been divided between a Latin speaking West and a Greek speaking East. You don't find Latin inscriptions in western Asia Minor until well into the late 1st century BCE, some two hundred years after the Roman conquest of that Greek speaking area. And Greek simply wasn't widely spoken in the West, especially not in France where the majority of university activity was taking place in the 12th century. Arabic on the other hand was a current language, still being spoken, and there was a huge amount of cross cultural contact and trade. The Catholic West and Islamic East were a lot closer than is popularly thought, if anything the whole of the crusades were really just a minor anomaly in what had been a fruitful (if not occasionally uneasy) cultural and mercantile relationship. Translations into Latin of Arab texts concerning the natural sciences begin appearing in Italy by the 10th century, with some of the scholars associated with the translations were actually from the Papal court. Plus, Ibn Rushd was born in Cordoba, the most populous city in the world by the 10th century, a major cosmopolitan centre. Overall, the Iberian peninsula was an incredibly fertile ground for cross-cultural sharing, and following the reconquista a huge number of Arabic manuscripts were left behind and made available to scholars for translation. The trend of translating Arabic texts into Latin falls off in the 14th century but picks up again around 1480 with a number of Italian Jewish scholars transmitting texts from Hebrew translations of Arabic originals. Hope that helps. Hellequin has a new favorite as of 17:03 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 15:12
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Moldbug has a huge essay called "How Dawkins Got Pwned"
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Oct 6, 2015 16:20
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found this on facebook https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/hisnameiscayden?source=wtfrt&position=1&trqid=6202560665715353345 quote:#HisNameIsCayden: Atlanta Mother Starts Hashtag After Co-Worker's Friends Mock Her Son on Facebook how many  FREE SPEECH comments are there, i wonder?EDIT: Still havent read the comments but cant post the image directly, only the link http://www.theroot.com/content/dam/....04.49_pm_1.png AmericanSouth.jpg BornAPoorBlkChild has a new favorite as of 17:11 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 16:56
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Moldbug has a huge essay called "How Dawkins Got Pwned" Obligatory:  
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