nihil architecture blogs

General elections have just been in this district-less country, as it seems, The Christian Democrat Appeal (CDA), the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), and the Party for Freedom (PVV) have the majority they need by one seat in the parliament, they have 76/150 seats between them, enough to support themselves a coalition in our parliamentary constitutional monarchy. A thing some monkeys are satisfied with, and some other monkeys fear.

PVV being the important factor here, a party that’s spun of from the VVD, probably internationally, and nationally known best, nay only for its leader, the enigmatic, charismatic and controversial Geert Wilders; in the eyes of some monkeys, but not his own, a racist and most importantly Islamophobe. As people’d expect, he initially got most of its vote from the lower-educated ‘common man’, but this trend has been decreasing slightly recently. He is partially one-issue, focussing a lot on the problems Islam brings, but he also has other issues, some his voter-base don’t know for a large deal. For instance, he wants the Dutch flag standing proudly on all official buildings, wants to have baby monkeys sing the anthem when classes start, focus more on getting them to know Dutch history, but conversely, wants to look into abolishing the international Dutch football-monkey team. He’s a nationalist, pretty much, he just hasn’t realized that a powerful tool to instigate nationalistic pride are the European Cups.

Any sane monkey would outright object to these guys getting into coalition, the party is quite new, very new, all members have next to no experience, they were personally picked by Geert, while most parties have a quasi-democratic voting model to settle these internal issues, Geert holds are the ropes here, he’s the autocrat of the party he founded, what he decides goes. And consequently, no one really knows all these people, all they know is Geert. As a fellow monkey I am partially guilty of this, one simply doesn’t hear any thing of it in the news outside Geert.

This echoes a prævious situation, the situation with the Pim Fortuyn Party (LPF), no one really knew any but Pim, he hand-picked them all, and the party got in a coalition with same CDA, and VVD; it was about the shortest lasting cabinet ever. Except that in this case, they’re all even more faultering idiots than in the last case, the few exposures I had to these people seem to imply that they—including Geert—have no understanding of the Dutch political system what-so-ever.

The point it comes down to is if the VVD (largest party) and the CDA‘ve learnt from this mistake to enter coalition with a bunch of far-right, populist newcomers that have no idea of how the political system works. Assuming they chose not to, what then? They heavily favour each other, and it means they’ll have to get their majority else-where, the other option would immediately be the Labour Party, who is second in the elections and has more seats than the PVV, but Labour’s really not that eye-to-eye with VVD or CDA and is centre-left, opposed to their centre-right. To classify them, a thing I abhor, it would be liberal-right, Christian-democrat, and social-democrat respectively, the former two associatively ‘right wing’ in Dutch politics, the latter ‘left’.

What if they’d rather go with the PVV? They only have a one vote majority, a vote of no confidence will be very easy to get, and I and all the other high-educated monkeys are all expecting them to bumble and screw things up beyond a reasonable margin. It’s a complex situation, but it’s not half as bad as people think, the last four governments fell before they had their four years due, it all started with the change of climate, towards open xenophobia. It’d be lovely to add this government to that list.

Robert Spitzer, M.D. claimed in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan’s study which sparked controversy regarding the professionalism of psychiatry:

If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labelled and treated me as having a peptic ulcer, I doubt I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.

Which is obscenely true. Just as it’s true that if you were to come there and complained about a stomach pain, got an interview and they labelled and treated you as having a peptic ulcer that would be irresponsible, and probably do more harm than good. Would medicine be effective if practised in that way? of course not, that’s why they do more than talk with you, they run tests on you via objective apparatus and instruments.

Psychiatry is tantamount to giving people radiation therapy for breast cancer because they claim they feel pain in their chest without putting an X-ray through them first. I’m not saying there’s a better way, I’m just saying that since most mental conditions are not fatal, moving like this is completely irresponsible and does more harm than good.

This is probably extremely useless info for most people and trivial for others but I just realized this and it’s too elegant to not bother the few that both don’t know of it and care about it with it. Basically, in mathematics there is a principle called ‘from a contradiction follows all’, or when you’ve stumbled on a contradiction, any proposition that can be expressed in your language is automatically true. Or rather, you may infer from that any so called ’sentence’ from your language, as sentences negated are also sentences… well… contradictions lead to contradictions. Often a contradiction is defined as for any sentence S, if we can derive:

S ∧ ¬S

We have a contradiction, the ¬ symbol takes a sentence, and negates it, which basically says that its falsity is true (note that that is different from saying that it’s not true or that it ’s false, but we’ll ignore that henceon for convenience sake.) and ∧ just means ‘and’.

So, how can we prove from that every other sentence? Well, it’s really quite simple:

1. S ∧ ¬S
2. S ∨ T (since S is true, then surely only S is true, or only T, or both for any random T)
3. T (but we just said that the falsity of S is true, and since S or T are true, if S is false, then T must be true right?)

Well, there you have it, any random sentence T with a truth value can be easily demonstrated to be true, which is… unhandy, it’s not that inconsistent mathematics is ‘wrong’, it’s just not very practical and above all not very interesting.

Logical systems may have another property, that’s called functional completeness, functional completeness basically means that we can compose from our functions all possible functions that take any number of arguments from {0,1} (true and false) and return a member of {0,1}. So what we want is basically a system in which we can construct any permutation of truth values. Now truth operations are in principle functions, when we say S ∧ T we can also express that concept as ∧(S,T) = 1.

Most often, the canonical example given for a system that is functionally complete is a system that contains the operations ∧,∨,→,¬ or AND, OR, IMPLIES, and NOT respectively, which may be defined as:

• AND: (1,1) » 1; else: 0
• OR: (0,0) » 0; else: 1
• NOT: (0) » 1; (1) » 0
• IMPLIES: (1,0) » 0; else: 1

It should become apparent that NOT is quite special as it’s the only function to take one argument. But this definition is extremely redundant because we may construct IMPLIES as follows:

S → T := ¬S ∨ T

Just do the maths, they return the same value each on the same inputs, so we can scrap IMPLIES from the list and still retain functional completeness, after all, we can construct it from the other functions. But it doesn’t end there, we can also scrap OR from the list by:

S ∨ T := ¬(¬S ∧ ¬T)

Quite intuitive, at least one of them is true if it’s not true, that both of them are not true, right? If both of them are not true, then surely not one of them can be true? So, we have a functionally complete system with only NOT and AND as we can construct the rest from it. But it goes on, we could have also opted to scrap AND by:

S ∧ T := ¬(¬S ∨ ¬T)

Both of them are true if and only if it isn’t true that at least one of them is not true, right? So, NOT and OR alone is also functionally complete. Lastly, the least intuitive one is this:

S ∨ T := (S → T) → T

Or, at least one of S,T is true if that S implies T is true implies T. Walk with me on this one, say that S is true here, then T is true, if T is true follows from that then as T implies itself of course, T is also true, thus the whole picture is true if S is true regardless of the other situation. If T is true, then S doesn’t matter any more and the fact that S implies T is irrelevant to the truth of T, so if T is true this picture also implies T, thus we have established that this returns true at least if either S or T are true. Now we want it to return false if both aren’t true. Well, we already established that IMPLIES returns true in any case that it’s first argument is not true. Thus it collapses, by that to TRUE → FALSE, which by the definition above is the only possible combination of arguments that results into FALSE.

So we’ve established that AND can be constructed using only OR and NOT, that OR can be constructed using only IMPLIES and NOT, and that OR can be constructed using only AND and NOT and that IMPLIES can be constructed using only AND and NOT, so, for a functionally complete system all we need is NOT, and one of the others. People just love redundancy don’t they?

This is all fine and nice, but back to that contradiction, how do we define it, well, we stated S ∧ ¬S, that’s the most common, but not the only way, another is: S → ¬S, for surely if a sentence implies its own negation, that automatically leads to the former definition? And lastly, you guessed it ¬(S ∨ ¬S) . So, it all falls into place, if a system can state a contradiction, it is functionally complete, if it is functionally complete it can state a contradiction, another one of those fine things which show why God hates us and why all systems that have some useful and cool property automatically also have a major downside that comes with it.

And no—you zealots of rigour, this is not intended as a proof, this is an illustration, I’m not going to Hilbert-style this on a blog that’s mainly for a relative take on holocaust denial.

When I was twelve years old. Some thing happened that changed the course of my life. I began experimenting with drugs. I was never truly aware of their destructive nature. I wasn’t truly aware of what they did, some people told me to use them and I did, foolishly not questioning what their intentions were. I was given when I was twelve a psychotropic drug, a drug whose true functions were at that time, and are at this time not yet understood. No one knows how it works precisely, what is known is that some of the effects on it are in the eyes of psychiatry ‘benificial’, I indeed became less suspicious of people’s motives; together with my general awareness. I slept more, became drowsy all day long, I lost some degree of control of my muscles.

The drug I was given to, and told to to take was respiridone, an atypical antipsychotic medication. A drug that alters the functioning of the human central nervous system, a drug that plays with the delicate balance of dopamine in one’s brain; what dopamine does exactly is il-understood, however what is known is that it’s one of the most significant neurotransmiters to one’s functioning. It’s not just playing with matches, it’s giving a twelve year old child matches and telling him to play with it.

I was never informed of the true nature of this drug, and here I am, about a decade later. I’ve quit it for some years but the side effects are still there, of some side effects I don’t know if the drug caused them. I have tardive dyskenisa, apparently the standard cause of action is to stop or reduce the dosage if one experiences a tinkling feeling in one’s appendages. I was never informed of that, I had involuntary movements in my class room which amused my fellow students there, my teacher was never informed to look out for those. I had now idea what they were, I can’t squeeze a lump of clay now, or open any bottle. I’ve lost the ability to adapt to a regular day-and-night rhythm unless I take sleeping pills but then I never feel rested, it’s as if I didn’t really sleep.  I just get tired on random chaotic moments, some times twice a day, some times once in three days. there’s no pattern in how long I sleep and how long I’m awake. Needless to say it’s hard for me now to ever get a job, if I make an appointment I know there’s a chance I can’t make it because I have to sleep at that point. I also stay conscious while I sleep, I don’t know if it’s caused by the pills or that I had it before, as I remember always waking up as a child if my mother got home as I heard her footsteps outside. But I recall every thing that happened as I ’slept’ when I wake up, conversations I had, any thing, things other people said in another room. Great to sleep through lectures though. But it’s more like just lying down with my eyes closed than truly sleeping.

Well, one can say that it happens, drugs have their side-effects? But it was never my choice to make, in fact, I wasn’t even told of said side effects, in fact, I was twelve. Seriously, people complaining about things like video games and that they watch violent films, read not enoug books, spend too much time on the internet when it’s acceptable to pump a psychotropic drug into their central nervous system whose functioning is hardly understood? I fail to see any reason why this isn’t quite simply child abuse. Especially to make me less suspicous of others? Sounds like a nice Orwellian reality here… the state authorizes people to make them less suspicous, the suspicions to that the order of conformation isn’t perfect must be suppressed of course, thoughtcrime? Or Ritalin, that’s actually simply a milder form of cocaine, it can treat cocain addictions, and Ritalin addictions again can be relieved via cocaine. That’s just given to children in fact. Ritalin hower is pretty much the inverse of Risperidone, both in function and effect. One becomes more observant of their surroundings, one’s speed of thought increases, and if one’s a psychosis-risk it’s best to refrain from it, Risperidone is to treat a psychosis. But how many children are just loaded with Ritalin simply because behaviourily it seems to pay of, with no one caring to exactly how it works and what it damages in the process; the parents being uninformed that it’s just mild cocaine, and certainly the people who get the shit into their system? ‘Say “no” to drugs kids…’ the hypocrisy of it all.

And then people might say ‘the pros outweigh the cons’, the pros to whom? Yeah.. it’s nice as a parent if your child is just suspicious and you cannot have that perfect model child because it questions the motives of visitors, because your child doesn’t go swimming pools or goes with peers to the cinema, what you so want your child to do. You can make yourself believe you want a normal life for your child, but you really just want a normal child, so that the neighbours don’t look strange at you and question your ability to raise it. And for them to stop thinking it, parents simply are praepared to raise them like crap. How many parents ask their chidren when they give them those drugs ‘These drugs are going to change you in these ways, is that what you want? It’s your call.’, it’s not to help the child, it’s for the parents. And indeed, children never asked to be born, disgusting to see that parents happily mentally injure their children just so that the neighbours won’t frown, so that they can have a little child that fits in… seriously… stop deluding yourself that you do it for your child, then you’d stop the moment the child says it doesn’t want to.

Science is a wonderful, wonderful thing, it’s simply best not done by humans. The human mind is thoroughly ill conceived for scientific reasoning. There are two main ways in science to gather information, the ’scientific method’ and its stricter subset ‘logic’. If people claim that there are things logic can’t investigate then they are misinformed or simply lie. Logic can investigate every-thing, the problem is that it often takes too much time then, way too much, for a human being. The point of logic is that it is infallible, logic produces undeniable truth that is impossible to be refuted at a later time. It’s far more rigorous than the ’scientific method’ which makes a lot of subtle fallacies to be easy on our infantile brains. That’s why logic is really only applied to mathematics, computer science and theoretical physics the lot. Because those sciences are ‘fundamental’, which is a really cocky word for ‘investigate very basic structures’, sure, one can apply correct rigorous logic to biology, it just takes a shitload more time so biologists like to cheat a lot more with rigour as living organisms are a bit more complicated than your average division ring.

And as a result of that, biology and chemistry and what-not is often wrong. Plain wrong, in fact, more often wrong than right it seems as the majority of things it once claimed seem to be thrown into the trash can now. They cheat on logic, let correlation imply causation too much. Say ‘If we’ve seen it five hundred times, we can then assume it’s always like that.’, biology just happily disregards the fact that the entire concept of species and life itself can trivially be shown to lead to contradictions and are thus erronous concepts logically speaking. Chemistry is working with incorrect physical models which are off a little in their result but the correct ones are just too much a bugger to work with in such complicated systems.

But hey, they never said they proved it, whereas mathematics has a concept of ‘proven’, softer sciences often say ‘proven beyond all reasonable doubt’, but apparently it has thus far always turned out wrong if they said that? And they even admit themselves that they probably currently are at this moment and they will refine it in the future. That’s at least one reasonable doubt I can name against the ‘proof’, so no, it’s not proven beyond all reasonable doubt at all. So why is it put forward then?

Point is that science is part media sensation, there is pressure to obtain results. In fact, more often than not, the fact of having a result is more important than the correctness of said result, maybe not explicitly, but since they find it likely that they are currently wrong, why bring it into the open as a discovery? At max as a rough draft I’d say. But then there is again another result, another new spectacle so that we can say to our mirror image ’species of thinkers thou art indeed’.

Take for instance the wild assumption people had in the classical until mediæval times that an object falls at proportional speed to its mass. They didn’t even know the concept of acceleration back then. Obviously this hypothesis is false as for one it’s clearly visible than an object needs some time to start accelerating and for two a simple test will show that the mass isn’t really that relevant, especially in a vacuum with no air resistance. No one even thought of testing it; Gallilei did though, he found out it was wrong, and he was pretty much ignored? That’s probably because people like it if results are there and don’t like it if you take away results, even if the results are quite simply wrong. People aren’t that good at questioning results unless they have a new even spiffier ‘read: newer’ result to take its place. Often if you find a clear flaw in a result and point it out people say ‘What else can we do then?’, well, nothing? I thought science was about investigating knowledge and truth? No answer is better than prætending as if a wrong answer is right? But having an answer, no matter if it’s clearly wrong satisfies our ego a species of thinkers, wise men with beards in toga and philosophers.

Not really, the human mind seems to have the ‘thinking’ power of using correct decuction (logic) only at the most simplest of structures like those devision rings, axiomatic set theory, nonstandard analysis and what other obscure terms I can come up with to gain internets. And most people will even be struck as if reading Cardassian if they find literature in that field, for any structure complicated enough to have any meaning to it we can no longer apply the correct deduction and have to smuggle a little with results. Apparently more than a little as thus far we’ve always been wrong.

People really seem to forget that in a lot of cases just saying ‘I don’t know.’ is really the best answer a scientist can have, but then again, most scientists are actually employees, not scientists, so I can understand.

Also, science is currently not in a position to either say that God exists or it doesn’t, same for what the origins of life are. Sure, evolution is ‘proven beyond a reasonable doubt’, but no theory of the origin of life is currently remotely falsifiable, that’s a difference. Also, evolution has nothing to do with the big bang, physicists calculate things, biologists just guess along really, educated guesses though.

It was a glorios day for the empire, a magnificent debate about abortion, again. Kind of ridiculously trite and overdone, and I saw the light when I made my argument which no one responed to:

If children under three years old generally do not pass the mirror test, show no sign of empathy, can’t solve maths problem, can’t speak, show no indication of the ability to process cognitive language or possess any other quality which supposedly makes humans sentient and other animals not? Why is it then allowed to butcher a pig for supper but not kill a two year old child. No let alone an embryo whose nervous system has yet to develop?

It’s probably one of the most unconventional arguments against abortion I’ve ever seen, also one of the most stigmatic and inapropriate ones as it sanctions the killing of babies, effectively. However it did make me see that in all those trite debates about the same subject, people always use the same arguments over and over while there exist countless more which are just as powerful, if not more. For instance the topic of euthanesia, often the people against it say that only God decide when life ends. No one ever says back ‘You have death penalty in your country, shut up.’, it’s not only a lot simpler than the ethical debats about suffering. It’s also a lot more powerful, one brings the oponent on the knees. Use said’s own words against itself. There is no escape, Bush is in favour of death penalty and says that only God may decide when life ends, it’s quite simple to assert that he doesn’t quite practice what he preaches.

Are even ideological debates the domain of boundless peer pressure then. Not only the pressure to believe certain things, but also the pressure to use certain arguments? Repeating an argument does not strengthen it, reading an unusual argument is all but the excitement of it.

…is not scientific. Really the countless myths about that it is and the pseudoscientific arguments that people draw to supposedly back that up a-la Darwkins and Randi are prætentious at best, let us look into a few here:

Burden of proof: You have to prove some-thing exists not the reverse.

Very simple reductio ad absurdum: 500 years back, it wasn’t proven that Pluto existed, was that an undeniable scientific proof Pluto didn’t exist then? It wasn’t proven that America existed to Europeans is that an undeniable proof America didn’t exist then? Is this an undeniable proof any-thing outside the observable universe doesn’t exist? I’m sure you get that the argument doesn’t hold. It’s drawn out of context. All it says that if it’s not proven that some-thing exists is that it’s not proven that it exists. That does not equal a proof it doesn’t exist, until you’ve provided one. It just means the question isn’t resolved yet, what a lot of people seem to not be able to handle. The ‘I don’t know’ option, which is in all but a few cases the scientifically correct answer. Admitting you don’t have enough knowledge to make a scientifically accurate conclusion. Science isn’t out to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to every question. Saying ‘I don’t know’ is præferred when neither is proven beyond all reasonable doubt indeed. But.. biology.. it corrects itself all too often because biologists aren’t that scientific. In more serious (hard) sciences this happens not very often to never in mathematics and the lot. I can’t wait for that the holocaust actually did never happen.

By the way, about proving:

• It is possible to prove of some things they cannot be proven, this does not prove them false.
• It is possible of some things to prove that they cannot be proven false or true, this proves them independent.

Stone argument: Can God make a stone so big He cannot lift it himself?

This one concerns the Abrahamic deity mostly, as other religions don’t dabble in omnipotence all that much. One of my favourites though, not really an argument for atheism but I’ve included it. Okay, let us say we have a formal language in which we can formalise statements about the potency of an object x, P(x) is thus a certain thing that object ‘can do’. That langauge is also able to derive inconsistencies, by showing that certain potencies lead to others being unable to perform. Such as:

• P: The potency of being able to swim.
• Q. The potency of drowning every time one is in water.

Let’s just say it is provable that P -> NOT Q in this system. Let us have a certain x for which: P(x) AND Q(x). Obviously this is an inconsistency as we derived Q(x) AND NOT Q(x). Which is what you want for an omnipotent being. From a contradiction, every-thing follows. It means that every statement we can make in the language is now true. Including negations. Thus the object is ‘x’ semantically ‘omnipotent’. Does it stroke with the logic behind the laws of physic? no. But we’re talking about God, physics are no match for this guy, he’d frag pun-pun like it’s nothing. Also, it means that all objects are omnipotent but who cares.

‘All agnosts are actually really atheists.’

Completely true. Most agnosts are actually really atheists but style agnosticism because they know they have to because of all these arguments here. If you think that is an argument for atheism…

‘Atheism isn’t a faith. Is having no hair a hair colour?’

Ehh, what? This is such gibberish flawed a statement it’s pretty much equivalent to ‘Atheism isn’t a faith, can pigs fly after being eaten by Jews in the holocaust?’ it makes no sense, sorry, it’s absurd.

What a lot of people also fail to realize is that mainstream scientific notions are not inconsistent with creationism but rather so independent of them, they are however inconsistent with Young Earth Creationism, which is some-thing completely different and chiefly an Abrahamic notion. Also, contrary to what many people believe, science has no answers to the origins of life yet. They have a few ‘plausible theories’, which could have happened, but none have yet been proven to have happened. In effect postulating any of these as truth is scientifically equally flawed as some genesis-like story

Let us just take a quote from this, by the way very talentedly-Australian comedian / musician Tim Minchin:

If anyone can show me one example in the entire history of the world of a single spiritual or religious person who’s been able to show either empirically or logically existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their maul choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife… I will give you my piano, one of my legs, and my wife.

I’ve shown in the first argument already why this is so-so. But what’s more important is, even though he has not seen a proof of the impossibility of the task he requests, he is still willing to bet a fucking pianoforte amongst some minor things on it. It seems he’s not going by science here at all, but by his intuition, his gut-feeling. Hardly scientific of course and shows that atheists really aren’t that far from theists in this respect.

Counter-intuitiveness, the state of a situation where your gut feeling or ‘intuition’ says some-thing which is directly contradicted by rational and/or scientific arguments. One is said to be able to deal with counter-intuitiveness when one is able to let the rational arguments take præcedence over the intuition, most people cannot.

Dec 30 20:44:58 <Lajla>    Leik ehh.
Dec 30 20:45:05 <Lajla>    I want this CD.
Dec 30 20:45:10 <PFA>    do you come here often?
Dec 30 20:45:14 <Lajla>    But the catalogue of that label is in a .doc format.
Dec 30 20:45:37 <Lajla>    And I don’t have some-thing which can read .doc…
Dec 30 20:45:43 <Lajla>    And just for the second time.
Dec 30 20:45:48 <Lajla>    I forgot the adres.
Dec 30 20:45:50 <PFA>    ah, i see
Dec 30 20:46:06 <PFA>    Lajla: http://www.doc2pdf.net/
Dec 30 20:46:07 <flawd>    Lajla: openoffice is free and can read doc
Dec 30 20:46:11 <flawd>    or that
Dec 30 20:47:03 <Lajla>    I don’t have openoffice either.
Dec 30 20:47:14 <Lajla>    I don’t really use rich text.
Dec 30 20:47:15 <PFA>    then use the site i just linked you
Dec 30 20:47:18 <Lajla>    Plain text or hypertext, mostly.
Dec 30 20:47:31 <Lajla>    Well, it’s more an idea of principe.
Dec 30 20:47:50 <Lajla>    I mailed the label that they are most likely homosexual and ingaging in Scheiß-fests.
Dec 30 20:47:55 <Lajla>    Scheiße*
Dec 30 20:48:01 <Lajla>    engaging*
Dec 30 20:48:02 <Lajla>    No awi
Dec 30 20:48:04 <Lajla>    wai*
Dec 30 20:48:10 <Lajla>    Godvrdomme.
Dec 30 20:48:55 <PFA>    yeah, you know, that’s true
Dec 30 20:49:09 <PFA>    every time i save in .doc format i suddenly get this massive urge to shit in a cup and find a girl to make out with
Dec 30 20:49:16 <flawd>    Nothing wrong with being homosexual
Dec 30 20:49:18 <layne>    watch it
Dec 30 20:49:20 <layne>    seriously
Dec 30 20:49:24 *    layne has quit (Quit: leaving)
Dec 30 20:49:49 <PFA>    i’m pretty sure Lajla is bi or something, flawd, or at least has no problems with alternative sexualities. he’s probably being facetious
Dec 30 20:50:07 *    flawd nods
Dec 30 20:50:34 *    layne (~layne@localhost) has joined #asbs
Dec 30 20:50:35 *    ChanServ sets mode +q #asbs layne
Dec 30 20:50:35 *    ChanServ gives channel operator status to layne
Dec 30 20:50:46 <flawd>    wb
Dec 30 20:50:57 <flawd>    going to the grocerystore, bbs
Dec 30 20:51:00 <layne>    vpn’d in to my home network and lost conn
Dec 30 20:51:31 <Lajla>    Yah, I’m certainly not ’straight’.
Dec 30 20:51:40 <Lajla>    It’s just a German label.
Dec 30 20:52:09 <Lajla>    Engaging in Scheiße-fests is nothing wrong with either.
Dec 30 20:52:45 <layne>    don’t talk about your shit fests in here please
Dec 30 20:56:17 <Lajla>    And about homosexuality?
Dec 30 20:56:50 <layne>    that’s fine
Dec 30 20:57:06 <layne>    as long as we aren’t getting graphic details of things be it hetero or homo
Dec 30 20:57:50 <Lajla>    Some.. more than 80% of the world I’d reckon would consider two men kissing to be highly graphic if not offensive / immoral though.
Dec 30 20:58:19 <layne>    that’s alright, we don’t go by that 80% of the world
Dec 30 20:59:20 <Lajla>    You are going by the portion that considers people involved into various forms of coprophilia to be highly graphic if not offensive / immoral though.
Dec 30 21:00:41 <layne>    we aren’t here to talk about a shit fetish
Dec 30 21:00:53 <layne>    that’s not why this room is here
Dec 30 21:00:54 <jez>    ok im back :-)
Dec 30 21:00:59 <layne>    stop being a fucking smartass
Dec 30 21:01:05 <jez>    ive setup my worm-like creature (except it’s a meateater … cant stand those weakling herbivores)
Dec 30 21:01:08 <jez>    now pizza time :-)
Dec 30 21:02:16 <Lajla>    But this group is not to talk about homosexality, or Pizza? I’m just noting your bigotry here, think of this next time you talk to some-one with coprophilia and remember that person feels the same homosexuals felt 20 years ago. And think when you talk to some conservative Christian that said feels the same as you do now.
Dec 30 21:02:27 <Lajla>    I shall leave this joke now.
Dec 30 21:02:29 <Lajla>    Good luck.

The log above is a very clear example of a person not being able to deal with the counter-intuitive notion of that said’s view on coprophilia is not different than most people’s views on homosexuality thirty-odd years back. In fact, I’d reckon it to be likely that that person shared them would it be born thirty years sooner.

On a rather dubious site, I was entering ‘debate’ with some-one who was apparently a linguist, not only that, but also a linguist who not only claimed that a spelling standard regulated by an official body was ‘descriptive linguistics’, but also a spelling standard which differentiated two words which were phonetically equal as much as phonemically and simply spelt differently per etymology, which is also a regular process of a lot of similar couples in the language we spoke of, and also a spelling standard which is most notoriously wrongly applied even by adults in spoken of language, even after many months she still claims it’s descriptive linguistics with absurd arguments, also, she doesn’t like me. I’m talking about the ‘dt-rule’ in Dutch by the way. If you are a linguist, please tell her she sucks (cataclysm__child at hotm4il dot common extention) with my compliments. In fact, you don’t have to be a linguist, any-one who know the definition of ‘descriptive linguistics’ can just mail her and argue why she’s wrong, I’m against the argument of authority.

However that is completely irrelevant to the article actually and I’ll leave in the middle if I just wrote it as an excuse to rant on Nele, which actually is a pretty beautiful name I would name my daughter like that. The point is I had a debate with her which started about creationism and then ventured into scientific rigour. She continually accused me of not ‘understanding’ philosophy as I attacked Captain Moustache on flaws in reasoning like you’d never seen it. What also happened was that she said some things about the imperfection of maths such as ‘Mathematics has unproven theorems’.. yeah. That was the first thing she said. So I simply assumed she applied some terms wrongly, that’s a contradictio in terminis I fear, you can only call a statement a theorem after it’s proven, that’s the definition of a theorem. So I pointed that out and asked what she meant to get back not only some-thing which indicated that she just read a dubious article about it and didn’t understand shit what she was talking about. But also some clear errors she made which I pointed out. That’s the vital difference, I pointed out her errors, I could point them out and then I claimed she didn’t know or understand the process behind mathematical reasoning at all and suggested she stop talking about it as she made a complete fool of herself. How-ever after asking a lot of times ‘Yes, what am I misunderstanding about philosophy then, where do I err?’ she couldn’t give me any concrete examples, she just kept claiming I didn’t understand it regardless of that she couldn’t extract an error in reasoning or some factual data I stated wrongly about the subject.

Which sadly happens rather often. That people insist you are ‘wrong’ without them being able to show the point where you are wrong, which is just annoying. The same thing happens a lot of times in art. ‘You don’t understand art.’ How could you ‘understand’ art in the first place? You could agree with people who think they understand it, that’s as close as you can get. It’s a sum of opinions, studying art and having discourse about it. Same with continental philosphy like Nietzsche, I mean, come on, it’s formally just popular literature he wrote. He wrote it for laymen to read, people with no education in any scientific field ought to be able to understand it assuming ‘common knowledge’ as prærequisits and therefrom it is popular literature by definition. How people think of themselves as ‘intelectual’ by reading that or Nietzch is called a ‘thinker’ is beyond me.

This article sucks, next time a good old holocaust post, now go tell Nele why she’s wrong with my compliments, don’t just tell her she sucks, give arguments. Nahh, just forgot about it, I’ve given all the arguments I can, repeating an argument doesn’t make it more valid, no argumentanda ad nauseam please.

What I mostly encounter on the vast new world of unlimited uppertunities under God that is the internet in the debate about evolution is this:

• People who believe in God and believe that in science, ‘theory’ means ‘not yet proven’
• People who are atheist and consider the nonexistence of any ‘god’ to be proven, also evolution.

Both sides are redundantly stupid and the latter one often LOL biologists LOL. Let there be no mistake about it, the occurence of evolution is scientifically proven beyond all resonable doubt, the evidene is overwhelming and if you cannot see this you simply don’t want evolution to be there. We have fosiles, we have documentation in fosiles of life slowly changing from how it was 40 000 000 years back to how it  is now. We have fosiles documenting man evolving. We have fosiles of dinosaurs evolving into Birds, and please, do not say there aren’t any ‘missing links’. That’s bullshit, evolution is continious, it continious evolving, every species found is a link between the former and the next, we are a link between the homo ergaster and what may come after us. We have observer bacteria evolving in the lab into new species so don’t come with that ‘micro-evolution’ versus ‘macro-evolution’ crap.

However, atheist biologists. still. fucking. suck.

Arguments thereto are so enourmously simple. Their inability at coherent logic is saddeningly vast. Atheism for instance, they have argued thereto with the same amount of absurdity we often see from Young Earth Creationism against the age of the earth. Some simple arguments I have seen:

I have no reason to believe a god exists, therefore I don’t believe a god exists.

Logically fallacy, reduced to the absurd by: ‘I have no reason to believe all the specific people I’ve never met exist, therefore I don’t believe they exist.’ next:

Russell’s teapot shows no god exists and it’s random to assume it does.

False, Russell’s teapot says this: ‘If I were to point at a specific place in space and tell you there is a teapot there with no way for you to check that place, would you say there was a teapot there? If no, why say the same about God, it goes against occam’s razor.’, the difference being is that this shows the unlikeliness of the Abrahamic monotheistic God to exist, quite true, however for it to show that no god exists we would need a formulation of: ‘If I were to point at a all random places in space and tell you there is ‘any-thing’ there with no way for you to check those places, would you say there was ‘no-thing’ at any of those places where ‘any-thing’ is for your imagination to decide. If no, why say the same about any gods?’, this makes it a tad more complicated to overrule I hope.

Creationism is proven false in science.

Nonsense, Young Earth Creationism is contradictory to modern scientific consensus, creationism isn’t, in fact, creationism is currently independent of the modern physical framework. For fucks sake, I have to continue explaining to theists that Creationism and science aren’t contradictory, but Young Earth Creationism and science are. In fact, Creationism solves a great deal of puzzles, but those can also be solved of course by the multiverse hypothesis, and neither can we prove false or true at the moment. How could we, we can’t look before the big bang of course, we can’t say if the big bang was ’started’ by some intelligent force who devised all almost perfect laws of physics for complex structures to occur. Or it’s just so that this universe by sheer chance allows it because there are countless more in which they don’t occur combined with the anthropic principle. Biologists oft.. always think that the multiverse combined with the anthropic principle is more ’scientific’ as it has an ‘aurora of scientificness’ around it, this is is complete nonsense.

It’s important to realize though that we can’t speak of ‘before the big bang’, this is what a lot of people get wrong about the concept, that there used to be a certain long time of silence in a large void and then, BAM. Not quite, there was no time before the big bang, that’s the zeropoint of time. The universe started with a bang. It isn’t that ’some-thing came from no-thing’, ‘every-thing’ simply started in one point and then banged.

Obviously Young Earth Creationists are blind, but the same can often be said about biologists in the vein of Dawkins, they aren’t ’scientific’ in the sense that they also true to prove right a certain thing, they’re not trying to investigate what’s true, they have their minds made up and then try to prove it right. However what they try to prove right has an ‘aurora of scientificness’ around it, making Dawkins appear attractively British-the end.