The Refuge of the Toads

[comhcinc]

Maybe if AHA received death threats on Twitter they'd be taken more seriously by SJWs than ones delivered at knifepoint on the corpses of people she knows.

I mean doesn't that prove just how extreme she really is. She made that guy stab that other guy with her hateful rhetoric.

[Lsuoma]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37795008

Actually it sounds like three airbags were deployed:

A US college student has crashed into a police car while taking a topless selfie behind the wheel, say officials.

Miranda Rader, 19, rear-ended the patrol vehicle while sending nude photos to her boyfriend through the social media app Snapchat, police say.

The accident on Wednesday in Bryan, about 100 miles (160km) north of Houston, caused the airbag to deploy.

[AndrewV69]

OK so I started reading Immigration and the SPLC and finished the section titled "Crossing the Rubicon, SPLC Style".

So far nothing new about their tactics and dishonesty that other have written about. Going to finish it later. Perhaps they will mention their now $300 million warchest?

Anyway, links again:
Their Financial Statements and IRS 990
Line item 22 - Net Assets or Fund balances - Current Year 315,353,067 Do I need to tell you guys why and organization that the SPLC puports to be should not be sitting on all of this cash?

Do we not have a Pitter here who reads & understands Financial Statements and IRS 990 forms?

[AndrewV69]

Ally Fogg at it again:


A Safer World For Everybody: Discussing International Men’s Day in the House of Commons

Are the baboons scared of Ally or something? I would have thought that by now they would have been screaming for his blood.

[AndrewV69]

Ally Fogg at it again:


A Safer World For Everybody: Discussing International Men’s Day in the House of Commons

Are the baboons scared of Ally or something? I would have thought that by now they would have been screaming for his blood.

Bah I fucked up the link: here it is again http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2016 ... f-commons/

[Old_ones]

people with PhD's are smarter than us:

Isn't the real problem that PhDs are suppose to be smarter than use and more and more that doesn't appear to be the case anymore?

The degree isn't really about being smarter than other people - its about being able to produce scholarship in your chosen field. Candidates for the degree are required to write and publish papers to prove that they can be competent scholars.

The real problem is that a lot of academic fields are full of cancer and necrosis and people are getting Ph.D.s in those fields by proliferating it. If I come out of a Ph.D. thinking bogus research practices are valid, or if I only learned how to write complicated and lengthy papers defending an ideological position, then the "scholarship" I produce in my career might do more harm than good.

[Steersman]

OK so I started reading Immigration and the SPLC and finished the section titled "Crossing the Rubicon, SPLC Style".

So far nothing new about their tactics and dishonesty that other have written about. Going to finish it later. Perhaps they will mention their now $300 million warchest?

Anyway, links again:
Their Financial Statements and IRS 990
Line item 22 - Net Assets or Fund balances - Current Year 315,353,067 Do I need to tell you guys why and organization that the SPLC puports to be should not be sitting on all of this cash?

Do we not have a Pitter here who reads & understands Financial Statements and IRS 990 forms?

Seems plausible that they actually have that $300 million sitting in their war chest. What seems rather iffy at best is why:

[rayshul]

Red Pill now has a venue in Melbourne but they have to pay huge security costs AND they can't tell anyone the location because of the fear of psychos. Fucking mental shit.

[Sunder]

Timberwraith is apparently so proud of coming up with "the FIENDly atheist" that they used it twice.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Hehe, and now he's blocked me (but he had to get the last word in to let me know he was blocking me).

Dom Saunders is a pinko commie and a massive gaping cunt.

[Hunt]

Ally Fogg at it again:


A Safer World For Everybody: Discussing International Men’s Day in the House of Commons

Are the baboons scared of Ally or something? I would have thought that by now they would have been screaming for his blood.

Bah I fucked up the link: here it is again http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2016 ... f-commons/

Fogg provides FtB with a very valuable service. One convenient link they can ignore and that instantly absolves them from charges of being one-sided, biased, man-hating ideologues.

[Hunt]

Ok, haven't posted in a while. Got to get rid of that avatar. It's even making me sick.

[Spike13]

Another interesting Sargon video:



Apparently to SJWs Jared Diamond has become racist.

By the way I've discovered a SJW/Marxist critique of Diamond by James Blaut (the author quoted in the video) which is amazing in its dishonesty and inaccuracy. I'd post my counter-critique here, but it's shaping to be very long and I'm not sure anyone would read it.

Go for it Kirb!

I for one would look forward to reading it.

[Kirbmarc]

The degree isn't really about being smarter than other people - its about being able to produce scholarship in your chosen field. Candidates for the degree are required to write and publish papers to prove that they can be competent scholars.

The real problem is that a lot of academic fields are full of cancer and necrosis and people are getting Ph.D.s in those fields by proliferating it. If I come out of a Ph.D. thinking bogus research practices are valid, or if I only learned how to write complicated and lengthy papers defending an ideological position, then the "scholarship" I produce in my career might do more harm than good.

The biggest problem isn't that you can't criticize the ideology of those academic fields. You can. The biggest problem is when an ideological paper is factually incorrect it goes unchallenged through peer review and is simply assumed to be accurate because it's written by a known and famous academic.

Case in point: James Blaut criticized Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" (along with David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations") in his 1999 essay "Environmentalist and Eurocentrism".

The main point of Blaut's criticism of Diamond (and Landes, which I won't discuss here), as it is evident by the title of the essay, is that Diamond is "Eurocentric" and ignores, dismisses or downplays the agricultural, technological and socio-political developments in non-European areas of the world.

Among the criticism that Blaut makes there is the claim that:

[Diamond] dismisses tropical grains. Maize, he says, is less nutritious than the main Fertile Crescent grain domesticates, wheat and barley (apparently confusing moisture content and nutritiousness), and since early domesticated varieties of maize had small cobs and kernels, it would follow (he thinks) that maize took much longer than other grains did to become fully domesticated. Rice is simply declared to have been domesticated in midlatitude China, not tropical Asia. Sorghum is ignored.

The criticism here is shaky for a variety of reasons. I won't go into details here, but let's just say that Blaut has seriously misrepresented Diamond's position. The last sentence, however, is factually incorrect, and blatantly so.

In the 1997 Norton paperback edition of "Guns, Germs and Steel" Diamond, at page 125, writes:

As Table 7.1 (next page) summarizes, the domestication of local cereal /pulse combinations launched food production in many areas. The most familiar examples are the combination of wheat and barley with peas and lentils in the Fertile Crescent, the combination of corn with several bean species in Mesoamerica, and the combination of rice and millets with soybeans and other beans in China. Less well known are Africa's combination of sorghum, African rice, and pearl millet with cowpeas and groundnuts, and the Andes' combination of the noncereal grain quinoa with several bean species.

Again at page 133:

A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world's annual tonnage of all crops.
Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana.

Moreover again at page 133 Diamond discusses why certain crops weren't domesticated in regions where they could have led to the development of agricultural society. He includes sorghum as one of the cereals whose lack of domestication in Southern Africa (before the Bantu expansion) he needs to explain:

A typical puzzling example comes from Africa. The important cereal sorghum was domesticated in Africa's Sahel zone, just south of the Sahara. It also occurs as a wild plant as far south as southern Africa, yet neither it nor any other plant was cultivated in southern Africa until the arrival of the whole crop package that Bantu farmers brought from Africa north of the equator 2,000 years ago. Why did the native peoples of southern Africa not domesticate sorghum for themselves?

At page 186 Diamond includes sorghum in his reasoning at to why Africa's North-South Axis inhibited the spread of Fertile Crescent crops and isolated the Mediterranean zone in Southern Africa from Fertile Crescent crops:

Contrast the ease of east-west diffusion in Eurasia with the difficulties of diffusion along Africa's north-south axis. Most of the Fertile Crescent founder crops reached Egypt very quickly and then spread as far south as the cool highlands of Ethiopia, beyond which they didn't spread. South Africa's Mediterranean climate would have been ideal for them, but the 2,000 miles of tropical conditions between Ethiopia and South Africa posed an insuperable barrier. Instead, African agriculture south of the Sahara was launched by the domestication of wild plants (such as sorghum and African yams) indigenous to the Sahel zone and to tropical West Africa, and adapted to the warm temperatures, summer rains, and relatively constant day lengths of those low latitudes.

Diamond recognizes the modern worldwide success of cultivation of sorghum in hot, dry climates at page 388:

One set consists of plants whose ancestors are widely distributed from west to east across the Sahel zone and were probably domesticated there. They include, notably, sorghum and pearl millet, which became the staple cereals of much of sub-Saharan Africa. Sorghum proved so valuable that it is now grown in areas with hot, dry climates on all the continents, including in the United States

As we can see, to say that "sorghum is ignored" by Diamond is blatantly incorrect. Diamond recognizes its importance in the tropical combination of nutrients, its spread in tropical Africa, its contribution to the success of Bantu civilizations and its worldwide success in modern times. Diamond also wonders why sorghum wasn't adopted in Southern Africa before the Bantu expansion (and then offers an explanation on a socio-ecological basis).

To say that "sorghum is ignored" in Diamond's book is a serious, factual mistake (at best) that an academic like Blaut should have never made, because it severely undermines his argument that Diamond is dismissive of tropical grains, and so of non-European cultures and civilizations.

This isn't simply a matter of a skewed interpretation of Diamond's work, it's a mistake easily verified by anyone who has a copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel" at their disposal. Any peer reviewer of Blaut's essay worth their salt should have pointed this out this blatantly incorrect claim. Instead Blaut's claim that Diamond ignores sorghum went unchallenged through a process of peer review.

Blaut's essay is frequently cited as evidence that Diamond has a Eurocentric bias, but this claim rests on very shaky grounds. Nobody who was involved in the peer reviewing process of Blaut's essay bothered to check his claims, even the basic, easily verified ones. This makes you wonder about how the process of peer reviewing worked.

Blaut's essay was first found in the vol. 89, No. 3 of "Geographical Review", published in July 1999 by the American Geographical Society. We're not talking about a vanity press or a journal of post-modern/gender/sex/whatever studies here. We're talking about the journal of a renowened organization of professional geographers that requires their fellows to adhere to scientific principles. And yet a blatantly incorrect claim can go unchallenged through a process of peer review in its journal. That's pretty bad.

Many people in the radical left have praised Blaut's essay as an academically validated paper which shows that "Guns, Germs and Steel" is "Eurocentric". And why shouldn't they? After all it was published by a serious publication, so it was extensively peer-reviewed, right?

Since someone who just had eyes, fluency in English, an academic training in a different subject (corpus linguistic) and a copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel" at his disposal could find a blatant mistake in Blaut's essay we can all be allowed to be skeptical of the peer review process in this case. One wonders if other blatant mistakes could be found in other essays published by renowned scientific organizations.

TL;DR: There are reasons to be concerned about the peer review process in the social sciences, not just in po-mo "X" studies, but also in other fields, including "hard" social sciences like geography.

[DaveDodo007]

#DraftOurDaughters

https://i.redditmedia.com/dM7W15Lm02Unt ... ef5107215b

If women vote for her they can fucking fight her wars.

[Brive1987]

Poor PZ was on his knees begging for a troll while he flew to China.

May as well pose the question.

http://i.imgur.com/m4qJF4d.jpg

[Dick Strawkins]

Ally Fogg at it again:


A Safer World For Everybody: Discussing International Men’s Day in the House of Commons

Are the baboons scared of Ally or something? I would have thought that by now they would have been screaming for his blood.

Bah I fucked up the link: here it is again http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2016 ... f-commons/

Fogg provides FtB with a very valuable service. One convenient link they can ignore and that instantly absolves them from charges of being one-sided, biased, man-hating ideologues.

When Ophelia Benson left FTB she claimed that they had a policy to never publicly criticize one of their own.
Besides, Fogg is a writer for the Guardian - the sort of 'career' any SJW blogger would sell their Mother into white slavery in an instant to achieve.

[Brive1987]

This podcast by slymepit regulars has 64k views.
https://youtu.be/O6MgnlUbRZI

This FtB con video has 5K views.
https://youtu.be/Ea46b1Wj-rg

Shame eh? No.

[Brive1987]

Maybe we should share. Is this the first cross post between FtB and the Slymepit?

http://i.imgur.com/iVlCFdF.jpg

[Soapy Stevens]

On Blaut, I find his conclusion amusing: "But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science."

Surely Diamond, if Blaut's conclusion is correct, followed the tenets of modern social science. He made shit up is Blaut's accusation. Therefore, the only lessons of social science he ignored lay in making wrongthink shit up.

My feeling is that Guns, Germs and Steel got off to a good start then went off the rails. The idea of diffusion being easier across similar latitudes compared to similar longitudes together with the unusual geography of Europe itself where you have a whole lot of coastline and thus comparatively mild winters and summers makes a lot of sense - but Diamond, to make a book out of it, arguably stretched the idea too far, leaving him open to these kinds of attacks.

[Brive1987]

https://web.archive.org/web/20161028082 ... nt-page-1/

[Kirbmarc]

On Blaut, I find his conclusion amusing: "But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science."

Surely Diamond, if Blaut's conclusion is correct, followed the tenets of modern social science. He made shit up is Blaut's accusation. Therefore, the only lessons of social science he ignored lay in making wrongthink shit up.

My feeling is that Guns, Germs and Steel got off to a good start then went off the rails. The idea of diffusion being easier across similar latitudes compared to similar longitudes together with the unusual geography of Europe itself where you have a whole lot of coastline and thus comparatively mild winters and summers makes a lot of sense - but Diamond, to make a book out of it, arguably stretched the idea too far, leaving him open to these kinds of attacks.

I'm sure that Guns, Germs and Steel has its limits. But Blaut's criticism is skewed, biased, partisan and in many cases just plain wrong. It's almost as if Blaut read a different book from what I have here in my hands at times, or if he skimmed it and ignored the points where Diamond himself clarified some of his concerns.

Also Blaut makes some very baffling mistakes (to be charitable). He writes that Diamond ignores sorghum when Diamond provides plenty of context for the role of sorghum in tropical Africa, in the Bantu expansions and in inhibiting the diffusion of Fertile Crescent crops.

Blaut's essay is full of strawmanning and misrepresentations. I don't know if they're deliberate or simply a lack of due diligence in checking his claims, but his criticism of Diamond is terrible.

Diamond himself admitted some of the limits of his book in later editions, and there's plenty to criticize. But you have to criticize what's actually written there, not what you think it says.

[feathers]

I can't quite put my finger on it, but Iran's president reminds me of somebody.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bGYbmwDK54U/V ... ouhani.jpg

http://imgur.com/UUC4PlD.jpg

Even the simple ones are genius.

It's interesting how Fuzzy makes a shoop and Ape shows the original for comparison.




Wait, what?

[Kirbmarc]

https://web.archive.org/web/20161028082 ... nt-page-1/

I also know that the cowardly trolls always take advantage of my absences to crap on the site, so just be aware: I will prune threads ruthlessly as soon as I get a moment and am back on the Internet. Rather than engaging with the idiots, just leave a note that comment #X must die. Keyword: rochambeau.

"Freethought". Anyway I don't expect your comment to last long, or to be commented on by the Hordelets. Wrongthink and hatefacts can't be tolerated.

[feathers]

Twatter is closing their video sharing app Vine too.

You heard it through the grape-?

[Kirbmarc]

Case in point:

call me mark
28 October 2016 at 4:55 am
rochambeau
Comments 90-92 must die

[feathers]

Gotta protect those poor, downtrodden Islamic share-croppers of the Mississippi Delta!

And did you know that one in three Appalachian Salafis are victims of hate crime?

Given my estimate of their numbers, you must be talking of someone's left part of their chest plus their liver, at most.

[Brive1987]

I've taken to posting random pit posts in PZs. Because.

[Phil_Giordana_FCD]

I finally managed to pass that fucking circuit exam! Now I have one month to prepare the traffic one.

I haz a happy!

:)

[Søren Lilholt]

Drop what you're doing, NEWS incoming:

http://imgur.com/YU8028V.jpg

Why are the comments open? Does no one care the kid will be traumatized again when his Momma explains them to him?

htt%20%20p://imgur.com/Y7c3bKy.jpg

http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/mason-3- ... story.html

I don't like it when busybody strangers do things like that. Like when some random old woman told my friend's kid that her toy bunny was a boy, not a girl, on the basis that it had a blue t-shirt.

Is stuff like this mildly annoying? Yes.

Is stuff like this even remotely newsworthy? No. No it is not.

[Spike13]

I finally managed to pass that fucking circuit exam! Now I have one month to prepare the traffic one.

I haz a happy!

:)

Congrats, Phil!!

You'll be tooling about the greater roads of Europe in no time!

[AndrewV69]

On Blaut, I find his conclusion amusing: "But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science."

Surely Diamond, if Blaut's conclusion is correct, followed the tenets of modern social science. He made shit up is Blaut's accusation. Therefore, the only lessons of social science he ignored lay in making wrongthink shit up.

My feeling is that Guns, Germs and Steel got off to a good start then went off the rails. The idea of diffusion being easier across similar latitudes compared to similar longitudes together with the unusual geography of Europe itself where you have a whole lot of coastline and thus comparatively mild winters and summers makes a lot of sense - but Diamond, to make a book out of it, arguably stretched the idea too far, leaving him open to these kinds of attacks.

You guys keep this up I may reread Guns, Germs and Steel earlier than I first thought. I was going to finish Pinkers Better Angels 1st. But I am taking a break with some K.W. Jeeter right now.

While we are on the subject of Jeeter, does anyone have recommendations? I am re-reading Dr. Adder (next up is Infernal Devices )but is there a really good one of his that someone would recommend? I really have not read much of Jeeter compared to everything ever written by others such as Cherryh, S.M. Stirling, Clarke etc. etc.

[AndrewV69]

I finally managed to pass that fucking circuit exam! Now I have one month to prepare the traffic one.

I haz a happy!

:)

Gratz.

[Soapy Stevens]

I'm sure that Guns, Germs and Steel has its limits. But Blaut's criticism is skewed, biased, partisan and in many cases just plain wrong.

I'm not disagreeing. I was more pointing to Blaut's hypocrisy and his apparent belief that social science as practiced in many places actually has some science in it.

It's almost as if Blaut read a different book from what I have here in my hands at times, or if he skimmed it and ignored the points where Diamond himself clarified some of his concerns.

I suspect it was a "get off my turf" review. One to rally the troops in the pomo end of geography (the one that writes it in the plural). So, I dare say he skimmed it and, at the time, without the benefit of a searchable Kindle edition didn't take the time to perform some rudimentary checks. (I haven't checked my copy to see if sorghum is in the index of the printed version I've got).

[Spike13]

Andrew, the only Jeter I know anything about played for the Yankees.

[Spike13]

Getting back to the video, the young person makes the assertion that The theory that Diamond is working with is "SUPER RACIST", "bad science" etc. but makes no case that it actually is besides their say so.

Now the creator of the vid may feel that such claims are so self evident as to not need any support, but, that is just lazy (anyone see a trend here) bad presentation. If you are trying to educate you owe it to your audience to provide proof of what you are saying.

[Kirbmarc]

Getting back to the video, the young person makes the assertion that The theory that Diamond is working with is "SUPER RACIST", "bad science" etc. but makes no case that it actually is besides their say so.

Now the creator of the vid may feel that such claims are so self evident as to not need any support, but, that is just lazy (anyone see a trend here) bad presentation. If you are trying to educate you owe it to your audience to provide proof of what you are saying.

The thing is that there no proof that Diamond's book is racist. None. Zero. Zilch. Diamond wrote "Guns, Germs and Steel" as a book against racialist assumptions. If anything it's an anti-racist book. You can criticize it for being inaccurate, or for being overly simplistic, but not for being racist.

Blaut's criticism of Diamond's book is inaccurate, but even Blaut didn't accuse Diamond of racism, only of "Eurocentrism", of an academic bias towards studying the cultural and technological developments of Europe. Not once in his (wildly inaccurate) review does the word "racist" appear.

The young person in the video accuses Diamond of downplaying the role of colonialism. Except Diamond never does that. He offers an explanation about what made colonialism possible. You can argue that his explanation is inaccurate, but you cannot in good faith argue that he's saying that colonialism never happened or wasn't brutal.

The funny thing is that Diamond anticipated the accusations of an apologist for colonialism, and replied to them in his book. From Guns, Germs and Steel, page 17, chapter "Yali's Question:

One objection goes as follows. If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? Doesn't it seem to say that the outcome was inevitable, and that it would therefore be futile to try to change the outcome today? This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself.

Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it. That's why psychologists try to understand the minds of murderers and rapists, why social historians try to understand genocide, and why physicians try to understand the causes of human disease. Those investigators do not seek to justify murder, rape, genocide, and illness. instead, they seek to use their understanding of a chain of causes to interrupt the chain.

Calling Diamond racist is like calling someone who says that the harshness of the treaty of Versailles and the consequences of the 1929 crisis allowed Hitler to get in power a Holocaust denialist or even a Nazi.

[Spike13]

Kirb,

Exactly, in the beginning of the book, the question " why do your people have so much cargo and my people have so little?" Diamond makes it clear that the answer doesn't lie in racial superiority. He seems to go out of his way to make the point.

[Spike13]

Has anyone read Diamonds later book " Collapse, how societies fail"?

It was quite an interesting read, and given the arguements over our effects on the environment, a timely warning.

[feathers]

And if that weren't bad enough, they've done away with all ports except the new USB-C and a headphone jack. No normal USB ports, so you can't even use your damn flash drives without buying an adapter. Even the fucking power is USB-C. Why would they do away with the magnetic power cable? Are they mental?

USB-C is the same connector as Thunderbolt 3, so that was to be expected. Using the same connector for data, power in, power out is actually a welcome improvement, even if it means sacrificing the (acknowledgedly very elegant) magnetic connector. As for the old type-A USB connector, its time was overdue. Compared to the size and transfer rates of type-C they're mastodonts. They had to go.

USB C is the future. It's so much better that the older stuff. I am actually shocked they switched to USB C for power. That's awesome. Good on them. Did they drop the ethernet port? That wouldn't be a smart idea.

MacBooks haven't had ethernet for quite some time. You always have to make-do with a USB- or Thunderbolt-to-ethernet converter.

[feathers]

Where they get in trouble is they have lots of list of extremist groups and people. These tend to get political. They have a lot or money and feel the need to spend it so they hired people to research and make list. The nature of their advocacy attracts extremely left wing people and frankly they often have blinders on.

I thought the problem was they have amassed enormous capital that they don't feel the need to spend, so rather than putting a brake on their fundraising, they stuffed it in the bank.

[Brive1987]

Well it's not exactly Islam-gate. But it's the thought that counts.

http://i.imgur.com/5lmSsIY.jpg

[Hunt]

Poor PZ was on his knees begging for a troll while he flew to China.

May as well pose the question.

http://i.imgur.com/m4qJF4d.jpg

Just imagine the massive hard on PZ is going to have when he realizes he has actual troll comments to delete from an actual troll. He hasn't had one of those for at least a few years.

[Brive1987]

Btw this was in response to PZ's "totally open". :lol: - "please troll me" post.

Oh shit. We're not too seri-arse now days for casual drive by tree shaking are we? :?

http://i.imgur.com/Yd0ZCll.jpg

[Hunt]

If he passes out from lack of blood pressure, it will be your fault.

[Spike13]

And if that weren't bad enough, they've done away with all ports except the new USB-C and a headphone jack. No normal USB ports, so you can't even use your damn flash drives without buying an adapter. Even the fucking power is USB-C. Why would they do away with the magnetic power cable? Are they mental?

USB-C is the same connector as Thunderbolt 3, so that was to be expected. Using the same connector for data, power in, power out is actually a welcome improvement, even if it means sacrificing the (acknowledgedly very elegant) magnetic connector. As for the old type-A USB connector, its time was overdue. Compared to the size and transfer rates of type-C they're mastodonts. They had to go.

USB C is the future. It's so much better that the older stuff. I am actually shocked they switched to USB C for power. That's awesome. Good on them. Did they drop the ethernet port? That wouldn't be a smart idea.

MacBooks haven't had ethernet for quite some time. You always have to make-do with a USB- or Thunderbolt-to-ethernet converter.

All true, but it is a pain in the ass to have to utilize all kinds of dongles and adapters for the gear you already have.

I love the lighting connector on my I phone, but when they left their old connector I was cursing because none of my docking ports I had for my 3GS would work convieniently any longer.

Equipt.changes, things get better, sometimes the upgrading is a pain in the ass.

[Brive1987]

Poor PZ was on his knees begging for a troll while he flew to China.

May as well pose the question.

[i.mg]http://i.imgur.com/m4qJF4d.jpg[/img]

Just imagine the massive hard on PZ is going to have when he realizes he has actual troll comments to delete from an actual troll. He hasn't had one of those for at least a few years.

A helping hand is the least we can do for the disadvantaged and special needs constituents.

http://i.imgur.com/QHK700q.jpg

[Kirbmarc]

Btw this was in response to PZ's "totally open". :lol: - "please troll me" post.

Oh shit. We're not too seri-arse now days for casual drive by tree shaking are we? :?

http://i.imgur.com/Yd0ZCll.jpg

The funniest thing is the instructions he left to his Hordelets. "Just leaves a note that comment #X must die. Keyword: rochambeau".

Free thought at its finest!

[feathers]

I think Werleman might be one of the biggest cunts in history.

I don't know many of those people, but Geller and Shoebat ("batshoe") are so crazy and over the top no-one outside their small group of fans takes them halfway seriously. And of those who do, I don't think I've heard of any planning or taking violent action. Hateful, perhaps; extremist, hardly.

[Hunt]

A helping hand is the least we can do for the disadvantaged and special needs constituents.

http://i.imgur.com/QHK700q.jpg

Am I still eligible if I'm not physically disabled?

[feathers]

I'm not going to get into the plug business. A bag full of dongles being just what I yearn for.

This is not a dongle joke, is it? IS IT?

[Brive1987]

A helping hand is the least we can do for the disadvantaged and special needs constituents.

[.]http://i.imgur.com/QHK700q.jpg[/img]

Am I still eligible if I'm not physically disabled?

Bob is available and has been dispatched forthwith.

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/imag ... eKbvc8Lctg

[Bhurzum]

Am I still eligible if I'm not physically disabled?

Be careful what you wish for! You might end up locked in a wee room with Greta "rape fantasy" Christina, a bottle of "deep heat" and a wooden spoon to bite down on!

Christ, just thinking about that has got me dry-heaving...

[deLurch]

My question is: who on earth is left that would invite pz myers over to speak?

[Shatterface]

On Blaut, I find his conclusion amusing: "But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science."

Its nature vs nurture, innit?

If it isn't nature - the environment - which made Western Europe develop faster, we must be naturally superior.

[Brive1987]

People whose first language isn't English. But it's fucking amazing they'd spring an OS airfare

[Shatterface]

Fuck, first 'nature' in that last sentence meant to be 'nurture'.

[Hunt]

My question is: who on earth is left that would invite pz myers over to speak?

Oh, they never invited him to speak. Sweet and sour PZ is refreshing on a chill Beijing fall morn.

[Kirbmarc]

On Blaut, I find his conclusion amusing: "But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science."

Its nature vs nurture, innit?

If it isn't nature - the environment - which made Western Europe develop faster, we must be naturally superior.

Blaut's theory on the matter is that it's culture. Basically the Good Savages of Australia refused to develop agriculture because they knew it was ecologically and culturally unsound. The rest is European degeneration and aggression. Especially white aggression. White Europeans stole everything they had from others and were so wicked and evil that they subjugated the Good Savages everywhere.

Also the Chinese Empire was totes righteous and brought peace to China with no imperialism whatsoever until the Evil Whites showed up. The Japanese became evil because they followed the models of the Evil Whites.

Arab slavery? Not really a problem.Genghis Khan? Exaggerations, and he actually brought peace to the land. The Moghul empire? Rumors.

White is bad because colonialism is bad because capitalism is bad. The solution is worldwide Communism, comrades, but led by the PoCs because when dirty whites get their grubby greedy hands on it it turns into Stalinism. Mao was good, though.

[Shatterface]

You guys keep this up I may reread Guns, Germs and Steel earlier than I first thought. I was going to finish Pinkers Better Angels 1st. But I am taking a break with some K.W. Jeeter right now.

While we are on the subject of Jeeter, does anyone have recommendations? I am re-reading Dr. Adder (next up is Infernal Devices )but is there a really good one of his that someone would recommend? I really have not read much of Jeeter compared to everything ever written by others such as Cherryh, S.M. Stirling, Clarke etc. etc.

Morlock Night?

It's a sequel to The Time Machine and the first true 'steampunk' novel.