Fail Quotes

Started by Travis Retriever, October 17, 2009, 03:00:20 PM

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October 02, 2010, 12:45:28 AM #360 Last Edit: October 02, 2010, 12:50:41 AM by surhotchaperchlorome
*Applause*
Very well put, Shane.
You know that I'm not a Constitutionalist.  However, if someone is going to argue about the Constitution, they should at least be honest about what it says and means.
"When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world—'No. You move.'"
-Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man 537

In red are the fail quotes.  Whole conversation posted for full context.

It took place in the comment section of this video:
[yt]lvGUl_Qdlnc[/yt]
for those wondering.

Me: "My apologies in advance if I am misinterpreting what you said regarding what you like about Christianity, but you seem to be saying that the reason Christianity got so popular was because of the willingness of the believers to evangelize to people (e.g. going door to door).

Wasn't the spread of Christianity mostly because of their use of force (e.g. Theocracy), and the fact that, most people today are simply indoctrinated into it?
And that if Christianity had just been born recently, that most people would simply view the people proselytizing it simply as nut jobs?

Case in point, Scientology."

Audiofalcon7:  "Is it really Christianity, or the mixture of Christianity by political power? Is it the Christian doctrine itself, or the horrific disaster that comes from the centralization of an idea into a political structure?

Is it school's faults that they are so bad, or the centralization of academics? Is it the natural sciences' fault, or Soviet Russia's extreme desire for empiricism to the point where 2+2 DOESN'T equal 5?

I think the question is essentially...IS it Christianity?"


Me: "Christianity: /watch?v=EEs2PHfKVyM

But then, that's kinda my point...

It wasn't because people "were willing to make fools of themselves" so much so that people were convinced, but because people were converted by the edge of a sword that Christianity got to where it is.

The other stuff in the comment is pretty much a red herring."

Audiofalcon7:  "A red herring to what? It is all roughly the same thing.

I really don't think it is any social institution - such as Christianity, or labor unions, whatever - that are so problematic, as much as the centralization of them to, as you said it, the edge of the sword.

But alas, we're not on polar opposite opinions here. I think we both contend with the same thing. xD"


Me:  "'...as you said it, the edge of the sword.'
Indeed.
That, and the whole social inertia children indoctrinated into it deal, as I initially said.
Ironically, in my original comments, I never said it was a bad thing, just that I disagreed with Stef's points of how Christianity became so prevalent.

'A red herring to what?'
To my point of how Christianity spread."

Seriously, what is with all of the religious apologists in the anarchist movement?
Honestly, I don't even know what his point was with his first comment...
"When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world—'No. You move.'"
-Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man 537

"What is free will? I've yet to hear a definition that's coherent.

Specifically, are the decisions reached by a 'free will':

a) Fully caused (no, this would be determinism)

b) Fully uncaused (indistinguishable from random)

c) Partly caused and partly uncaused (like determinism, but with some non-determined randomness thrown in)

I think that exhausts the possibilities. None of these sound like what free-will-ists seem to have in mind, to me.
"-someone commenting on Lord T Hawkeye's latest video

He forgot about the part of our brains being probablistic.

Although something that has bothered me lately: What exactly IS free will?
Is it simply non-deterministic?
Or does it mean the ability to choose, and if so, how does having probablistic brains give us that?
"When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world—'No. You move.'"
-Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man 537

October 08, 2010, 04:01:16 PM #363 Last Edit: October 08, 2010, 04:05:49 PM by surhotchaperchlorome
"So, because you know nothing about a subject, that means it must be random? The reason quantum mechanics makes no sense to us is because we evolved in the macroworld. Our brains weren't made to handle really big things or really small things. Quantum particles and really, really, really small."--Some wanker in this video's comment section:

[yt]zsV1SVniaBA[/yt]

After reading some comments from Stargazer and others, I've come to the conclusion that the Determinist understanding of Quantum Mechanics is about as good as the Creationist understanding of Evolution by Natural Selection.
"When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world—'No. You move.'"
-Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man 537

I avoid the quantum mechanics debate because it's not really my field of expertise.  I find you really don't have to go that deep to demonstrate that determinism is unfounded nonsense.  The determinist says the universe is scripted and I say "Okay, show me the script" and they get ticked at me.
I recently heard that the word heretic is derived from the greek work heriticos which means "able to choose"
The more you know...

You don't need to go deep into QM. I'd love to see someone reconcile determinism with the double-slit experiment, or the Casimir Effect.

October 09, 2010, 12:39:39 AM #366 Last Edit: October 09, 2010, 12:45:30 AM by Lord T Hawkeye
QuoteYou don't need to go deep into QM. I'd love to see someone reconcile determinism with the double-slit experiment, or the Casimir Effect.

Can't say I've heard of them before.  Care to enlighten me?

By the way, does anyone think I'm being unreasonable when I say that to be a nihilist, you can't logically correct or object to anyone's behavior because to so is to suggest a more preferable course of action which runs contrary to the claim of nihilism?
I recently heard that the word heretic is derived from the greek work heriticos which means "able to choose"
The more you know...

Quote from: Lord T Hawkeye on October 09, 2010, 12:39:39 AM
Can't say I've heard of them before.  Care to enlighten me?

By the way, does anyone think I'm being unreasonable when I say that to be a nihilist, you can't logically correct or object to anyone's behavior because to so is to suggest a more preferable course of action which runs contrary to the claim of nihilism?

Not quite. You would have a hard time calling a behavior unethical by your own personal ethical system, but you could argue that their behavior runs counter to their stated objective, or expose a contradiction in their own ethics.

And then they drank tea.

Quote from: Lord T Hawkeye on October 09, 2010, 12:39:39 AM
Can't say I've heard of them before.  Care to enlighten me?

With the double-slit experiment, a laser is shone through two tiny slits, the barrier between which is smaller than the wavelength of the light used. When this happens, instead of getting two dots of light on the wall as you might expect, you get an interference pattern, meaning the light waves are interfering with each other as they exit the slits. The crazy thing is, you still get the interference pattern even when you only send through one photon at a time--meaning that a single particle exists in two places at the same time!

But if you have a detector observe the particle on its way to the photographic plate--even if it doesn't observe it until AFTER it's left the slits--it will be seen to have only gone through one of the slits, and there will be no interference pattern created. It could be either slit.

The Casimir Effect is a way of detecting virtual particles which form spontaneously in a vacuum. Ordinarily, these form in particle-antiparticle pairs and immediately annihilate each other, but with this experiment one particle is absorbed, leaving the other to emit a very tiny amount of energy.

Now if we could build an engie that utilizes the casimir effect would you get an perpetual motion machine?

It wouldn't be perpetual motion, because the act of absorbing one of the particles corrodes the plate a bit. In a sense, it's like taking one tiny particle from the plate and turning it into energy, except that's not really what's going on.

So you're generating something only you don't.
No wonder all those scientists that somehow got a hold of a deathray and enough juice to power it went mad.
I always wonderd did they go mad right before discovering the quantum principle of generating energy out of thin air or right after it.
I mean, which was the prerquisite of which.

Quote from: Virgil0211 on October 09, 2010, 04:01:28 AM
Not quite. You would have a hard time calling a behavior unethical by your own personal ethical system, but you could argue that their behavior runs counter to their stated objective, or expose a contradiction in their own ethics.

But then you're suggesting that it's objectively preferable to practice what you preach no?
I recently heard that the word heretic is derived from the greek work heriticos which means "able to choose"
The more you know...

That's an interesting point: a nihilist should should consider pragmatism as no more preferable than any other approach.