"You/the party you support are contemptible commie/Nazi-like asshole who cares about nothing but killing people and other heinous stuff. Now discuss with me."
Get my point?
I will not pretend that I consider the modern GOP to be anything but contemptible scum. Isn't it better if people know where I stand from the outset?
If you are interested in standing on a soapbox, scoring points and ranting, sure. If your interest is having a debate, no. Because nobody from the other side will ever take you serious enough to debate you or think you worth their time.
Saying I'm belligerent is one thing, saying I'm debating in bad faith by likening all my opponents to Nazis and other assorted Bad People(TM) is another. You'll surely agree that these are two different accusations. On this thread so far I haven't personally attacked even one single participant, so where's this belligerence? Is insulting the GOP really so far out on this board all of a sudden?
You are still not getting it and at this point I wonder if I should ever attempt to talk to you again or just roll my eye and scroll past your posts. My objections are to the aim of your "debating" and the general tone of your posts.
Whoever says "education does not matter" can try ignorance
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A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is 'survival as what'? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! - Chief Judge Haywood
------------ My LPs
Thanas wrote:If you are interested in standing on a soapbox, scoring points and ranting, sure. If your interest is having a debate, no. Because nobody from the other side will ever take you serious enough to debate you or think you worth their time.
You can be serious, work on using good sources, and just be dismissed by the other side because your arguments are liberal.
I know,
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."
Ecclesiastes 9:5 (KJV)
Meh... evolution is more like a cool algorithm. It's basically a naturally occurring algorithm based on errors while duplicating code and environmental feedback for determining fitness. Yeah, it results in all kinds of hilariously cruel things, but it's also awesome.
Azathoth is also awesome from a certain point of view- that's not the point.
The point is that evolution is a design process, a natural process by which design emerges from chaos. But it is... it is not intelligent design, it is unintelligent design, mindless design. Designs that no sentient being would ever consider building that way, and things that no person with a scrap of decency would make to operate that way.
Thus, the idea of calling evolution a "blind idiot god" makes a certain kind of sense. Evolution does indeed tell us something about the way design and purpose can emerge in nature, even in the total absence of the God of Abraham, or any other supernatural deity. But the 'god' depicted by the evolutionary process is... unthinking and inhuman in the extreme.
Sure, I understand the Lovecraftian analogy. I just think it's less useful to interpret evolution as a "design process" of any sort, because evolution is really a lot more like crystallization or algorithmic fractal patterns that your screen saver might produce - it's a beautiful, elegant natural process that arises from simple physical laws, leading to all sorts of beautiful and horrific patterns - including, apparently, complex neural networks that are capable of reflecting on their own existence.
Channel72 wrote:Sure, I understand the Lovecraftian analogy. I just think it's less useful to interpret evolution as a "design process" of any sort, because evolution is really a lot more like crystallization or algorithmic fractal patterns that your screen saver might produce - it's a beautiful, elegant natural process that arises from simple physical laws, leading to all sorts of beautiful and horrific patterns - including, apparently, complex neural networks that are capable of reflecting on their own existence.
Yes. But that same complex neural network that is capable of reflecting on its own existence has certain problems with some of the OTHER products of said same process. Which is one of the reasons biologists who were religious starting out often stop being religious sometime before they get their PhD.
And the lovecraft analogy is not supposed to be useful. It is supposed to be poetic.
GALE Force Biological Agent/
BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/ Entomology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences
There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.
