The Refuge of the Toads

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Brive1987
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Brive1987 »

Today I encountered science surrounded by and embedded in a sea of rape. Just another moment in our sad sick privileged existence.

Or as PZ put it in his latest post, swimming in a sea of whiteness.

Brive1987
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50282

Post by Brive1987 »


Brive1987
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Brive1987 »


Dick Strawkins
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Dick Strawkins »

Guest_935516df wrote:
KiwiInOz wrote:Chastity is living the feminist dream. Who knew?
Hmm... I don't doubt that there are 32 year old virgins who are women

But her entire livelihood & identity is wrapped up in being Super Catholic.
https://cicdc.org/leonine/meet-2015-201 ... e-fellows/
Kate Bryan

Director of Communications, American Principles Project

Kate Bryan serves as the director of communications for the American Principles Project in Washington, D.C. Kate holds a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts/Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville, and a Master’s degree in Public Affairs and Political Communication from the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. Prior to APP, Kate served as the director of communications and programs at Live Action, she worked in the Senate in Dublin, Ireland, and served as research director of the two leading pro-life groups in Ireland — Youth Defence and the Life Institute. Kate has appeared on numerous television and radio programs on EWTN, The Blaze, Sun News Network, Ave Maria Radio, Relevant Radio, and more. She regularly speaks on life, politics and culture, and has written for several publications on the same topics, including TIME, IJReview, The Daily Caller, Acculturated, The Federalist, Breitbart, Catholic News Agency, and Catholic Vote
https://twitter.com/katembryan

She would not be the first Catholic republican to publicize her virtue and be full of shit. My spidey sense says she is either lying or a lesbian.
More likely she is just asexual and interprets any form of sexual behavior as wrong (or sinful).
I checked online for the percentages of asexuality in the population and it turns out that it's very hard to estimate since asexuals are the group most likely to decline to take part in surveys on sexual attraction. At the moment estimates vary between 1 and 14% in the population with the highest numbers found in unmarried women - like Ms Bryan.
I think it's not too much of a conjecture to say that a mix of asexuality with religious justification is probably the answer in this case - as in the case of many other religious zealots.

That said, this may be restricted to women as most anti-sex male religious zealots seem to inevitably end up getting exposed as sexual hound-dogs.

sp0tlight
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by sp0tlight »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:Xe needs to release another computer game and quick. I suggest a text-based adventure.
Matt, text adventures can be fun and are challenging to get right (I'm not talking "chose your own adventure" shit), I don't think "fun" is in their wheelhouse.

Steersman
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50286

Post by Steersman »

VickyCaramel wrote:
Steersman wrote:
VickyCaramel wrote: gurugeorge: "Interesting snippet of Saudi TV with a vigorous discussion showing that there are voices pushing for reform, and they are listened to:-

[.youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AObVI59ilB4[/youtube]"

The guy doing the talking seems to be Dr. Nasser Al-Dashti. I suspect that debate is actually happening in Kuwait. And unfortunately, Memri is an Israeli propaganda outfit, known for giving less than charitable translations. Much of the stuff they put out is accurate, but some of it is a complete hatchet job, unless you speak arabic/farsi you can never really tell.
Learn something new every day and all that. However:
Praise for MEMRI
John Lloyd has defended MEMRI in the New Statesman:
<snip>
Well fuck me, the New Statesman praises MEMRI, will wonders never cease! Next you'll be telling me that the Guardian criticizes them!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/ ... anwhitaker ...
Mirabile dictu! As you said or suggested, lots of bias all over the place, and on both sides of any issue - tempted frequently to say the proverbial "a pox on both your houses", a mercurial statement if there ever was one, so to speak .... But that Guardian article seems on a pretty even keel, although it too has a few questionable items. For instance:
Nobody, so far as I know, disputes the general accuracy of Memri's translations but there are other reasons to be concerned about its output.

The email it circulated last week about Saddam Hussein ordering people's ears to be cut off was an extract from a longer article in the pan-Arab newspaper, al-Hayat, by Adil Awadh who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of it. ...
But it subsequently issued, commendably, somewhat of a retraction:
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday August 21 2002:

In an article headed Atrocity stories regain currency, page 13, August 8, and in an article headed Selective Memri on the Guardian website, we referred to Dr Adil Awadh, an Iraqi doctor who alleged that Saddam Hussein had ordered doctors to amputate the ears of soldiers who deserted. ... His reference to orders by Saddam Hussein to cut off the ears of deserters has been supported by evidence from other sources.
But seems the crux of the matter, and maybe the more damning case of blindness or bias, is this:
The second thing that makes me uneasy is that the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel. I am not alone in this unease.

Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington Times: "Memri's intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible."

Memri might, of course, argue that it is seeking to encourage moderation by highlighting the blatant examples of intolerance and extremism. ....
Maybe if there weren't so many damning incidents - from the extremist Salafism that Saudi Arabia has been peddling in the US and Europe, and that has led to the closure of mosques in France and elsewhere; to the Arab world's response to Orlando, to the human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and the entire Muslim world (Raif Badawi); to Iran's fatwas against Rushdie; in a virtually unending litany of horror stories - that "reflect badly on the character of Arabs" then maybe Memri wouldn't have so many credible justifications for making so much political hay out of them. And why the "character of Arabs" is so much in the toilet. You may wish to read Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today for an additional damning bill of particulars in that regard - and I rather doubt you can lay a charge of "Israeli propaganda" or "Mossad mole" at her doorstep.

And that's all largely secondary, so many red herrings, so much window dressing, when it comes to the fundamental question - which few have the guts or intellectual integrity to address - of whether Islam is fundamentally antithetical to the principles and values of Western democracy and human rights.
VickyCaramel wrote:Another trusted academic who critisizes them is Norm Finkelstein.

Code: Select all

"They use the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis,"
http://www.rense.com/general77/norm.htm
Maybe Finkelstein does qualify as a "trusted academic", and maybe that article does make a few credible points, although I couldn't find Whitaker's supposed "basically a propaganda machine" in that Guardian article. However, not sure that that Jeff Rense - the owner of the blog site that published that article - is all that credible himself:
Jeffry Shearer Rense is an American radio talk-show host. His show, the Jeff Rense Program, publishes various conspiracy theories, and was formerly broadcast via satellite radio, which remains archived online.[1][2]

Rense's radio program and website promote views such as 9/11 conspiracy theories,[3] UFO reporting, paranormal phenomena, creation of diseases, chemtrails, evidence of advanced ancient technology, emergent energy technologies, and alternative medicine.

Rense's writings and website have been deemed anti-semitic by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. ...
"A pox on both your houses", indeed.

AndrewV69
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by AndrewV69 »

KiwiInOz wrote:
AndrewV69 wrote:I may have given FreeFromThought blogs a bump ... but that would be overestimating how much reach I have?
Plus the topic is not really a popular one.
OMG. What abouth teh menz? #notallwomenandgirls

I notice that there aren't any comments there from the regular FTB crew.
Ally has been pretty charitable all along, and consistently so. You know I only agree with Ally around 50% of the time and I really think he might be way too charitable here:
Hush now Carnation, you know what happens…. it’s like Candyman.
Anyway, thanks for the comments folks.
For what it is worth, my own best guess at the answer to the question in the title is that it is a little bit of all of the above.
Carnation is quite right to talk about the nature of bureaucracies, everything tends to happen like the old story about trying to design a racehorse by committee and it ends up as a camel. With civil service & quangos, an awful lot of stuff ends up coming out as a compromise between members of staff being ordered to produce something out of half a dozen contradictory and incompatible instructions.
At the same time, I do get the strong impression that Saunders is going out of her way to suppress data about male victims. I doubt it is spite, as such. Based on her articles and interviews I think it is more that she still, genuinely doesn’t get why it is a problem, doesn’t understand why the likes of me keep complaining. I suspect she is just passionately immersed in the narrative about male violence against women and her one and only concern is to make sure that as much attention and as many efforts as possible are devoted to that issue and it is not that she has any animosity towards male victims, it is just that she has got absolutely no handle on their issues and needs.
All pure speculation, of course.

Yep. Some of the regulars have show up but so far none of the vacuous hordelets. But Lucy has show up and as usual has a different perspective :
As a brief recap for anyone joining this story late, last summer around 30 of us, including some of the most distinguished and respected charity heads and academics in the field of men’s welfare, signed an open letter criticising the CPS for presenting statistics on VAWG that secretly included many thousands of men and boys – around one in six of all victims. In the aftermath the UK Statistics Authority got involved, echoing our concerns. They instructed the CPS to rewrite the report with more honest clarity and also chided them, not only for the way the report had been written but also for the way the statistics had been presented to the press and, from there, to the public.

Or
A couple of journalists used to getting listened to, some junior academics in pseudo scientific subjects in minor universities, somebody who knows about the sociology of sport, and some CEOs of charities with some truly bizarre names (who require precisely no qualifications and don’t even need to be registered with the charities commission) clubbed together to try to publicly blackmail an official into reproducing her report by accusing her of nefarious corruption. Then employed the services of a nefarious masculinist in the heart of government to sidle up to her at a drinks do in a rather corrupt and secret manoeuvre.
It must be a shock to find that being a Guardian columnist, not to mention a rankly sexist Telegraph opinionator doesn’t carry the universal weight it so clearly deserves.
Who needs the hordlets when you have Lucy?

Søren Lilholt
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50288

Post by Søren Lilholt »

Tigzy wrote:
Indeed, seemingly the only thing she didn't copy from this cartoon is that one of the characters is black.

Duly noted, Brianna... :whistle:

Kirbmarc
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Kirbmarc »

Steersman wrote:Kind of amusing, if you're kind of into gallows or gothic humour, that even nominally credible critics here in the Pit of at least some sects of Islam - such as Kirbmarc, much less Pitters who are either dyed-in-the-wool Muslims such as Korban or jimhabegger or who are fellow-travelers or "cafeteria Muslisms" such as Andrew, are unable or unwilling to actually address that question. And even nominal reformers such as Nawaz who've at least broached question of compatibility of theocracy and democracy still refuse to repudiate the demands that are intrinsic to the former. Pox on all their houses - "moderates" and "extremists" and "reformers" and all the shades in between; Rizvi:
Straight for the horse's mouth:

[tweet][/tweet]

As Rizvi has explained to you his tweet isn't about Muslim reformers, it's about Muslim who say that they're "moderate" but still want a muslim world based on the Qu'ran. People who agree with the goal of the Islamic State or of Iran but disagree with their methods.

As for me I've explained plenty of times that I think that Islam is a bad idea in general, and I'm not just a critic of a sect of Islam. I simply recognize the right to have bad ideas as long as you don't want to impose them onto others either through violence or through illiberal laws and demands. I've also written plenty of times that criticism of the bad ideas in Islam has to come from everywhere, especially from the people who defend liberal values like (at least nominally) the left.

I have no problems in agreeing that Islam based on Qu'ran literalism is incompatible with liberal democracy, and that alternate interpretations are made very hard (not impossible: nothing is impossible in the matters of interpretation) by the idea that the Qu'ran is the literal word of god. Promoting alternate interpretations is especially hard today since the literalists have money, political support and often portray themselves as "moderate community leaders" when they're anything but.

[They're also very eager to attack any critic of Islam as a racist/white supremacist and every Muslim reformer as a "porch monkey" "traitor" "house muslim" etc. They're helped by the morons of the Regressive Left, from open shills like CJ Werleman and Nathan Lean to profiteers and demagogues like George Galloway, to useful idiots like Jeremy Corbyn, to people with some good principles but with a strong anti-Western bias that clouds their judgement and more than a dollop of intellectual dishonesty, like Glenn Greenwald and (partly) Noam Chomsky, to say nothing of the countless nobodies who say that the US Religious Right is just as bad as salafism and deny that Islam is far worse than Christianity today, like Myers or the Orbitards. This is how the Regressive Left is shielding Muslim supremacists.]

The difference between you and me is that I'm against theocracy and Muslim supremacist ideas (which are the core of Salafism, but aren't shared just by Salafis) while you want to ban Islam as a religion and expel all Muslims from where you live except those who pass an arbitrary test. You can portray yourself as a critic of theocracy and promoter of liberal democracy as much as you want, and claim that you're only against theocracy, but you're not.

You want to punish people just for having ideas (not for planning or inciting to violence and/or subversion), and that's as incompatible with the principles of liberal democracy as Muslim theocracy. I want for everyone to be free to criticize, mock and ridicule ideas (not simply, as you say, "do nothing") without busybodies trying to punish you or fire you for expressing criticism of Islam, no matter its form, to severely punish people who plan or incite to violence and subversion of liberal democracy (for example by establishing "sharia patrols" or by tearing down posters they don't like) and to maintain the laws and principles of liberal democracy (one laws for all, no blasphemy laws, no laws against "Islamophobia", no laws against "indecency" or against "fat shaming", etc.) with no "special rights" (better meals in prisons, gender-segregated party meetings, the right to "blackball" critics, etc.) to anyone, to fight against religious privileges.

You seem to think that every muslim in every sect of islam and from every part of the world is part of a collective intelligence that makes it physically impossible for them to live in a liberal democracy and respect its laws and principles simply for the fact of being a Muslim (except, maybe, if they "piss on the Qu'ran"). It's kind of amusing that you share this idea with the Salafis, who also think that any muslim who doesn't work towards their specific brand of theocracy is "not a true muslim".

Muslims are human beings, and human beings are more complicated than that. They're able to hold contradictory ideas, to reinterpret literal statements in creative ways, to cherry pick and dissociate. Sure, the Qu'ran contains many, many terrible ideas, theocracy is the worst form of government and literalists have an edge when it comes to interpretation, but the history of islam isn't just a history of pure theocracy and pure literalism, and nothing says that the theocrats and literalists have to win, no matter how strong they look now (and yes, right now they're pretty strong, especially since they're the ones with more money and political support).

The Bible is also choke full of terrible ideas, and not just in the Old Testament. Jews and Christians have taken it literally (more or less, I'm overly simplifying things here) for centuries, and a literal interpretation of the bible is incompatible with liberal democracy, too. Now many, probably most of them no longer do, and cherry pick to their heart's content.

Not all periods of the history of Islam have been dominated by pure literalism in the style of the Salafis. Moreover, even in recent times, Muslim-majority countries had started to at least partly open up and secularize in the Sixties/Seventies. Have you asked yourself what happened, and why those attempts failed? Have you look into the history of Iran, of the Middle East, have you thought about the connection between the oil shock of 1973 and the beginning of the rise of Muslim supremacists? Have you asked yourself who finances imams that come to the west with enough money to buy and maintain a small mosque and then preach "lovely" messages like "death to democracy"? Have you looked into what happened in Syria and which groups are fighting other groups, and who finances and support which group?

Instead of asking others to "address a question" that they've already addressed countless times try to address the questions above for once. You're eager to say that others are willingly blind and refuse to question their biases, but I've never seen you addressing your own blind spots and biases. You can start now.

Really?
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50290

Post by Really? »

Dick Strawkins wrote:
Guest_935516df wrote: Hmm... I don't doubt that there are 32 year old virgins who are women

But her entire livelihood & identity is wrapped up in being Super Catholic.
https://cicdc.org/leonine/meet-2015-201 ... e-fellows/
Kate Bryan

Director of Communications, American Principles Project

Kate Bryan serves as the director of communications for the American Principles Project in Washington, D.C. Kate holds a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts/Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville, and a Master’s degree in Public Affairs and Political Communication from the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. Prior to APP, Kate served as the director of communications and programs at Live Action, she worked in the Senate in Dublin, Ireland, and served as research director of the two leading pro-life groups in Ireland — Youth Defence and the Life Institute. Kate has appeared on numerous television and radio programs on EWTN, The Blaze, Sun News Network, Ave Maria Radio, Relevant Radio, and more. She regularly speaks on life, politics and culture, and has written for several publications on the same topics, including TIME, IJReview, The Daily Caller, Acculturated, The Federalist, Breitbart, Catholic News Agency, and Catholic Vote
https://twitter.com/katembryan

She would not be the first Catholic republican to publicize her virtue and be full of shit. My spidey sense says she is either lying or a lesbian.
More likely she is just asexual and interprets any form of sexual behavior as wrong (or sinful).
I checked online for the percentages of asexuality in the population and it turns out that it's very hard to estimate since asexuals are the group most likely to decline to take part in surveys on sexual attraction. At the moment estimates vary between 1 and 14% in the population with the highest numbers found in unmarried women - like Ms Bryan.
I think it's not too much of a conjecture to say that a mix of asexuality with religious justification is probably the answer in this case - as in the case of many other religious zealots.

That said, this may be restricted to women as most anti-sex male religious zealots seem to inevitably end up getting exposed as sexual hound-dogs.
I admit that I am not an expert in biology, but wouldn't our species and subsequent generations have evolved differently if 14% of females had zero interest in sex? Particularly in the past few generations, where childbirth is not a necessity in the first world?

And where are the gluten free, peanut allergic asexual people in Kenya?

Keating
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50291

Post by Keating »

That looks like the kind of place Sam Neil would hang around.

Kirbmarc
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Kirbmarc »

Really? wrote:I admit that I am not an expert in biology, but wouldn't our species and subsequent generations have evolved differently if 14% of females had zero interest in sex? Particularly in the past few generations, where childbirth is not a necessity in the first world?

And where are the gluten free, peanut allergic asexual people in Kenya?
The 14% data is an extreme exaggeration. I doubt that the percentage of asexual people is higher than 1%, and even that is probably too much if you want to consider truly asexual people (i.e. people who really dislike the idea of sex). Many studies consider people who don't have a high libido as asexual, which is why the numbers are all over the place. There's probably plenty of people (especially women) who aren't Carrier-like horndogs but are still able to be interested in sex with a limited number of potential partners.

I've read a study which considered everyone who doesn't have sex or masturbate at least once a week to be asexual, which would probably have counted me as asexual when I was a teen, or in some other periods of my life, since I don't wank (although I have sex when I find a woman that I like and who likes me). :lol:

Dick Strawkins
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Dick Strawkins »

Kirbmarc wrote:
Really? wrote:I admit that I am not an expert in biology, but wouldn't our species and subsequent generations have evolved differently if 14% of females had zero interest in sex? Particularly in the past few generations, where childbirth is not a necessity in the first world?

And where are the gluten free, peanut allergic asexual people in Kenya?
The 14% data is an extreme exaggeration. I doubt that the percentage of asexual people is higher than 1%, and even that is probably too much if you want to consider truly asexual people (i.e. people who really dislike the idea of sex). Many studies consider people who don't have a high libido as asexual, which is why the numbers are all over the place. There's probably plenty of people (especially women) who aren't Carrier-like horndogs but are still able to be interested in sex with a limited number of potential partners.

I've read a study which considered everyone who doesn't have sex or masturbate at least once a week to be asexual, which would probably have counted me as asexual when I was a teen, or in some other periods of my life, since I don't wank (although I have sex when I find a woman that I like and who likes me). :lol:
I think the 14% figure was related to unmarried women rather than women as a whole - and since it came from a Kinsey study it was a long time ago when unmarried women were a more select group than today. Currently an unmarried women could be regularly dating, having kids, living in a long term relationship, etc and those women can be a significant fraction of women in general so I'm sure that Kinsey's figure is not an accurate portrayal in todays unmarried women group.
As for the dedicated spinster, particularly of a religious or ideological persuasion (think Benson), I am not sure that the 14% is going to be far off the truth.

Regarding the evolutionary significance - well, having zero interest in sex is clearly going to be a disadvantage, although that disadvantage may only become apparent when women have the freedom to live their full lives without sex and have no consequences of that. In a society where children are expected (if only to keep the farm or business going and look after their parents when they get old) as it was in most societies until relatively recently, a woman might not have that much choice in the matter - hence they would marry and produce kids whether they were interested in sex or not.
As far as I know asexuality is having no desire for sex rather than sex being a physical impossibility and many asexual people who are with sexual partners do have sex.

rayshul
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by rayshul »

No wanking at all?

MarcusAu
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by MarcusAu »

I'm not so sure about that.

Perhaps listening to two gay guys will help get you started.


Søren Lilholt
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Søren Lilholt »

Kirbmarc wrote:

I've read a study which considered everyone who doesn't have sex or masturbate at least once a week to be asexual, which would probably have counted me as asexual when I was a teen, or in some other periods of my life, since I don't wank (although I have sex when I find a woman that I like and who likes me). :lol:
Ah, that's how you find the time to write all those long posts. ;)

fuzzy
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by fuzzy »

I've become darn near asexual at 59. The doc tells me my testosterone levels are low, and I am not a bit surprised. Still up for a nice wank on a regular basis, I suppose, and still well able to hold up my end of the transaction should the opportunity occur; but no longer willing to enact the labor of romantic pursuit.

MarcusAu
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by MarcusAu »

Nevermind Fuzzy - as long as you don't express any outright condemnation for others who are sexually active - you won't lose your coveted status as a 'Rape Enabler' .

MarcusAu
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by MarcusAu »

I think that societal levels of asexuality may actually be higher than first thought.

On conducting a short survey - I found that 100% of the people asked did not want to have sex with me.

I'm thinking of asking a third person sometime in the next 6 months.

Steersman
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50300

Post by Steersman »

Kirbmarc wrote:
Steersman wrote:Kind of amusing, if you're kind of into gallows or gothic humour, that even nominally credible critics here in the Pit of at least some sects of Islam - such as Kirbmarc, much less Pitters who are either dyed-in-the-wool Muslims such as Korban or jimhabegger or who are fellow-travelers or "cafeteria Muslisms" such as Andrew, are unable or unwilling to actually address that question. And even nominal reformers such as Nawaz who've at least broached question of compatibility of theocracy and democracy still refuse to repudiate the demands that are intrinsic to the former. Pox on all their houses - "moderates" and "extremists" and "reformers" and all the shades in between; Rizvi:
Straight for the horse's mouth:
[Remove everything after and including the question mark - preview helps too]

As Rizvi has explained to you his tweet isn't about Muslim reformers, it's about Muslim who say that they're "moderate" but still want a muslim world based on the Qu'ran.
Just because he said that it isn't about the reformers doesn't mean that it can't be applied to them. As I explained in another tweet, I thought it had more import than he intended or anticipated. Maybe arguably, if those "reformers" [aka apologists] are still insisting that Allah literally wrote the Quran - "still deeply revere the book that endorses [barbarisms]"; why else would they do that? - then they're accessories before and after the fact.
Kirbmarc wrote:People who agree with the goal of the Islamic State or of Iran but disagree with their methods.
Right. Goals like imposing Sharia. Which is the case for a disturbingly large percentage for North American and European Muslims, and for an even larger percentage of "immigrants" and "refugees"; Pew Forum:

http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/g ... view-1.png
http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/g ... view-1.png
Kirbmarc wrote:As for me I've explained plenty of times that I think that Islam is a bad idea in general, and I'm not just a critic of a sect of Islam. I simply recognize the right to have bad ideas as long as you don't want to impose them onto others either through violence or through illiberal laws and demands.
You mean, like Sharia? And death for gays and apostates, and support for child-marriage? You notice many Muslim groups in the West actually repudiating those? When I see some evidence of that then I'll consider that there's some possibility of them becoming "housebroken", i.e., civilized.
Kirbmarc wrote:I have no problems in agreeing that Islam based on Qu'ran literalism is incompatible with liberal democracy, and that alternate interpretations are made very hard (not impossible: nothing is impossible in the matters of interpretation) by the idea that the Qu'ran is the literal word of god.
Looks like a bit of an ipse dixit or weasel words or shading into some post-modernism: "it's all just narratives, man!" Issue seems less a question of interpretation than whether it can be construed as fact or not that Allah wrote the Quran.
Kirbmarc wrote:The difference between you and me is that I'm against theocracy and Muslim supremacist ideas (which are the core of Salafism, but aren't shared just by Salafis) while you want to ban Islam as a religion and expel all Muslims from where you live except those who pass an arbitrary test.
"You keep using that word [theocracy] ...." It's "a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god"; Islam is fundamentally not a religion but a totalitarian form of government. One that is intrinsically antithetical to the principles of democracy and human rights.
Kirbmarc wrote:You seem to think that every muslim in every sect of islam and from every part of the world is part of a collective intelligence ...
No, but sometimes the evidence lends some credence to the conjecture:

And:
Muslims cut bodies for faith

ISLAMIC fanatics are mutilating themselves at a British mosque in a bloody ceremony carried out only yards from a busy high street. ...
Fucking nutcases, certifiable.
Kirbmarc wrote:Muslims are human beings, and human beings are more complicated than that. They're able to hold contradictory ideas, to reinterpret literal statements in creative ways, to cherry pick and dissociate.

Churchill wrote:Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. ...
Indeed.
Kirbmarc wrote:The Bible is also choke full of terrible ideas, and not just in the Old Testament. Jews and Christians have taken it literally (more or less, I'm overly simplifying things here) for centuries, and a literal interpretation of the bible is incompatible with liberal democracy, too. Now many, probably most of them no longer do, and cherry pick to their heart's content.
In case you hadn't noticed it, it's been some time since Christianity has attempted to impose a theocracy. And the US Constitution more or less precludes it. Part of the warp and woof of Islam, bred in the bone. You're trying, somewhat desperately by the look of it, to compare apples and aardvarks.
Kirbmarc wrote:Have you look into the history of Iran, of the Middle East, have you thought about the connection between the oil shock of 1973 and the beginning of the rise of Muslim supremacists? Have you asked yourself who finances imams that come to the west with enough money to buy and maintain a small mosque and then preach "lovely" messages like "death to democracy"? Have you looked into what happened in Syria and which groups are fighting other groups, and who finances and support which group?
Of course - we've discussed it many times and at some length. But it's still somewhat of a strawman when it comes to the issue of the compatibility between Islam and democracy - you and Nawaz and Rizvi and Aslan and Namazie and Ansar and innumerable others, although I'll concede there's a spectrum there, can blather on about "reforming Islam" till the cows come home, but it still doesn't address that question.
Kirbmarc wrote:Instead of asking others to "address a question" that they've already addressed countless times try to address the questions above for once. You're eager to say that others are willingly blind and refuse to question their biases, but I've never seen you addressing your own blind spots and biases. You can start now.
I have "addressed the questions above", and have done so many times - and have generally provided explicit evidence to justify my answers and positions. But while you say you've "addressed countless times" that question, it seems you tend to dance around the issue rather than confronting it head on. Although I'll concede that your recent "Islam based on Qu'ran literalism is incompatible with liberal democracy" is a commendable step in the right direction. But the crux of the matter there is that that literalism is an essential element of Islam, the sine qua non. Rizvi talks, presumably, a great game in his new book, The Atheist Muslim but that looks like an oxymoron, a "deepity", an egregiously false profundity that ignores if not tries to whitewash away that element. How else can "moderate" Muslims possibly "revere" a book that endorses "misogyny, murder or homophobia" unless they see it as literally written by Allah "Himself"?

paddybrown
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50301

Post by paddybrown »



The last word on the Deep Rifts?

sp0tlight
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50302

Post by sp0tlight »

fuzzy wrote:Well, crapitty-crap crap, my water pressure seemed low today, and a check showed the water line to my house busted sometime last night somewhere down near the meter.
I feel you, my mate's summer place had a pipe bust and since we're not going there that often it generated over a $2000 bill.

Steersman
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50303

Post by Steersman »

AndrewV69 wrote:
KiwiInOz wrote:
AndrewV69 wrote:I may have given FreeFromThought blogs a bump ... but that would be overestimating how much reach I have?

[.tweet][/tweet]

Plus the topic is not really a popular one.
OMG. What abouth teh menz? #notallwomenandgirls

I notice that there aren't any comments there from the regular FTB crew.
Ally has been pretty charitable all along, and consistently so. You know I only agree with Ally around 50% of the time and I really think he might be way too charitable here:
<snip>

Who needs the hordlets when you have Lucy?
Haven't had time to check out Ally's post or the Guardian article, but thought I would read this recent Telegraph post into the record in passing:
Why does no one care when boys fail at school and middle-aged men kill themselves?

White boys are falling further behind at school and more middle-aged men are committing suicide, yet men's issues are still dismissed as a laughing matter, says Martin Daubney ....

feathers
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50304

Post by feathers »

fuzzy wrote:I've become darn near asexual at 59. The doc tells me my testosterone levels are low, and I am not a bit surprised. Still up for a nice wank on a regular basis, I suppose, and still well able to hold up my end of the transaction should the opportunity occur; but no longer willing to enact the labor of romantic pursuit.
Oh is that the pipe you were talking about when you mentioned "low water pressure".

Brive1987
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50305

Post by Brive1987 »

Keating wrote:
That looks like the kind of place Sam Neil would hang around.
And it's a perfect pitch for off swingers.

Carrier beware.

Phil_Giordana_FCD
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50306

Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

gurugeorge wrote:Interesting snippet of Saudi TV with a vigorous discussion showing that there are voices pushing for reform, and they are listened to:-

That guy is great! We need more of him (not in a multiple-body-parts-detached way).

Phil_Giordana_FCD
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50307

Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

fuzzy wrote:Well, crapitty-crap crap, my water pressure seemed low today, and a check showed the water line to my house busted sometime last night somewhere down near the meter. It almost certainly ran over a hundred dollars worth of water; thankfully I was able to reach down and feel for the valve and get pliers onto it to close it off. I'll have a better idea how much water I bought tomorrow morning when enough water has sunk into the ground that I can see the meter. (the water association is not at all magnanamous about forgiving such bills.) If I have to get the local backhoe guy here it's a minimum of four hours at $80 per hour so another $320.

There's some small chance that it's within a couple of feet of the box, such that I'll be able to shovel it out myself. At least I know how I'll be spending the weekend.
This is why we're lucky our building has a communal water bill. It allows my work room to be flooded without impacting individual water bills too much.

:twatson:

Seriously, I hope the loss wasn't too big.

CommanderTuvok
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50308

Post by CommanderTuvok »

bovarchist wrote:
CommanderTuvok wrote:Another loopy SJW professor. Not sure what her age is, but she looks 40+, and she has the aposematism died hair thing going on...

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/28952/
She doesn't seem that loopy to me, tbh. More like someone genuinely embarrassed about having to enforce a rule.
Her CV (or resume for you yankees) tho!

CommanderTuvok
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50309

Post by CommanderTuvok »

Re: PZ Myers moaning about photoshops.

I've just spent half an hour doing a shoop of PZ Myers and making him look as idiotic, ridiculous and dumb as possible.

Here it is......

http://media.salon.com/2012/04/myers.jpeg

Phil_Giordana_FCD
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50310

Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

sp0tlight wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote:Xe needs to release another computer game and quick. I suggest a text-based adventure.
Matt, text adventures can be fun and are challenging to get right (I'm not talking "chose your own adventure" shit), I don't think "fun" is in their wheelhouse.
Do not ever dis "Choose your Own Adventure" books! They were a key part of my formative years, and look what I've become...






...Ok, point well taken.

KiwiInOz
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50311

Post by KiwiInOz »

Brive1987 wrote:
Keating wrote:
That looks like the kind of place Sam Neil would hang around.
And it's a perfect pitch for off swingers.

Carrier beware.
Was thinking it was a dishy pitch. I'm down that way (a bit further south but just as west) next week.

Malky
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50312

Post by Malky »

gurugeorge wrote:
When I was in my mid-20s, I got interested in Sufism via Rumi, and eventualy got round to reading the Quran, thinking it must be pretty good if it inspired the Sufi stuff, which seemed marvellous to my hippy self at that time.

I was shocked at how much of an insane, babbling rant it is. I was also shocked by a pre-vision of the PC culture today, when I was at a squat party, expressed the above opinion about the Quran, and this AIDS Skrillex type socialist started ranting and raving at me about how I mustn't say such a thing (this was the early 80s).

BUT, there are also beautiful phrases here and there in the Quran, and hints at the kinds of mystical things the Sufis talk about.

I know from Nawaz' autobiography (which everyone here should read if they haven't already) that his love of Islam is of the mystical side - his respect for an old relative who used to come round to his house and live by example some of the wiser side of Islam. All religions have a good side. Just as it's impossible to feel any particular feeling forever, it's impossible for a culture to sustain a high pitch of something like jihad forever, and at some point people have to get on with their lives, and in those periods of normal living, the religion can still have something to offer.

Look guys, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on with this Universe we find ourselves adventuring in, so I don't begrudge religious people taking a punt. I also understand that a community that has a shared view of the over-arching context of existence, has a particular cohesiveness, and if the view is held non-dogmatically, it's kind of fun (I recently worked at a Christian charity - and I can tell you straight up, it's the most fun I ever had in a workplace environment - they were kinda goofy, but they were mostly nice, well-meaning people, and their religion clearly did give them a sense of togetherness).

So I think eliminationist rhetoric about religions in general is misplaced. The liberal way (as I explained in our last exchange further up Steers) is to respond only to bad actions and bad actors. For the rest, leave it to the agora, let people hash it out over the years, the decades, the centuries. We've only been here for the blink of an eye in cosmic terms, it's hardly likely that any of us have all the answers, and we must always reserve a tiny bit of Bayesian probability for everything.

But we must respond.
Agree very much with Sufism as being very interesting - I believe that Ommar Khayyam was a Sufi. However apart from Steers I don't think that many in the Pit are eliminationist but what I believe is that we must be eliminationist about religion having any influence on anything other than the private lives of the adherents and all religions co-habiting will just have to agree to disagree. However I am also aware that at the moment this is something of a Utopia but we should aspire to this. If we got anywhere near this ideal I believe that religion would eventually wither as most are set up as power structures and without that power would not be attractive. This is also Utopian at the moment.

Ape+lust
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50313

Post by Ape+lust »


Ape+lust
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50314

Post by Ape+lust »


Ape+lust
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50315

Post by Ape+lust »

Sharing the wealth :dance:

http://imgur.com/lUY4UB0.png

Malky
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50316

Post by Malky »

katamari Damassi wrote:I've been reading the Red Rising books(think Hunger Games meets Red Mars). They're an enjoyable beach/airport read. It has me thinking about terraforming and I think Venus would be an easier job than Mars. I've just been doing simple math of percentages in my head and would need an actual smart person to really figure it out, but Venus has roughly 90x earth's atmospheric pressure, and 96% of its atmosphere is CO2. Erect a sunshade in space. I know it would be at least a couple thousand kilometers in diameter but it would only need to be a couple of molecules thick. The shade lowers the temp until the CO2 falls like snow. 96% of the atmosphere is now solid on the ground so the pressure is now near Earth's. Then use synthetic organisms or drones that can process the frozen CO2 into C and O2. The only real long term problem I can see is lack of water.
Crash a couple of Comets on Venus

jimhabegger
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50317

Post by jimhabegger »

gurugeorge wrote:When I was in my mid-20s, I got interested in Sufism via Rumi, and eventualy got round to reading the Quran, thinking it must be pretty good if it inspired the Sufi stuff, which seemed marvellous to my hippy self at that time.

I was shocked at how much of an insane, babbling rant it is. I was also shocked by a pre-vision of the PC culture today, when I was at a squat party, expressed the above opinion about the Quran, and this AIDS Skrillex type socialist started ranting and raving at me about how I mustn't say such a thing (this was the early 80s).

BUT, there are also beautiful phrases here and there in the Quran, and hints at the kinds of mystical things the Sufis talk about.

I know from Nawaz' autobiography (which everyone here should read if they haven't already) that his love of Islam is of the mystical side - his respect for an old relative who used to come round to his house and live by example some of the wiser side of Islam. All religions have a good side. Just as it's impossible to feel any particular feeling forever, it's impossible for a culture to sustain a high pitch of something like jihad forever, and at some point people have to get on with their lives, and in those periods of normal living, the religion can still have something to offer.

Look guys, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on with this Universe we find ourselves adventuring in, so I don't begrudge religious people taking a punt. I also understand that a community that has a shared view of the over-arching context of existence, has a particular cohesiveness, and if the view is held non-dogmatically, it's kind of fun (I recently worked at a Christian charity - and I can tell you straight up, it's the most fun I ever had in a workplace environment - they were kinda goofy, but they were mostly nice, well-meaning people, and their religion clearly did give them a sense of togetherness).

So I think eliminationist rhetoric about religions in general is misplaced. The liberal way (as I explained in our last exchange further up Steers) is to respond only to bad actions and bad actors. For the rest, leave it to the agora, let people hash it out over the years, the decades, the centuries. We've only been here for the blink of an eye in cosmic terms, it's hardly likely that any of us have all the answers, and we must always reserve a tiny bit of Bayesian probability for everything.

But we must respond.
:clap:

jimhabegger
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50318

Post by jimhabegger »

fuzzy wrote:Well, crapitty-crap crap, my water pressure seemed low today, and a check showed the water line to my house busted sometime last night somewhere down near the meter. It almost certainly ran over a hundred dollars worth of water; thankfully I was able to reach down and feel for the valve and get pliers onto it to close it off. I'll have a better idea how much water I bought tomorrow morning when enough water has sunk into the ground that I can see the meter. (the water association is not at all magnanamous about forgiving such bills.) If I have to get the local backhoe guy here it's a minimum of four hours at $80 per hour so another $320.

There's some small chance that it's within a couple of feet of the box, such that I'll be able to shovel it out myself. At least I know how I'll be spending the weekend.
:o Keep us posted.

Spike13
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Posts: 3014
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50319

Post by Spike13 »

Poor Steve... He can't even get his internet meme-dom to lift off properly.

Perhaps he needs some tips from Melody.

jimhabegger
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50320

Post by jimhabegger »

Hunt wrote:
katamari Damassi wrote:I've been reading the Red Rising books(think Hunger Games meets Red Mars). They're an enjoyable beach/airport read. It has me thinking about terraforming and I think Venus would be an easier job than Mars. I've just been doing simple math of percentages in my head and would need an actual smart person to really figure it out, but Venus has roughly 90x earth's atmospheric pressure, and 96% of its atmosphere is CO2. Erect a sunshade in space. I know it would be at least a couple thousand kilometers in diameter but it would only need to be a couple of molecules thick. The shade lowers the temp until the CO2 falls like snow. 96% of the atmosphere is now solid on the ground so the pressure is now near Earth's. Then use synthetic organisms or drones that can process the frozen CO2 into C and O2. The only real long term problem I can see is lack of water.
CO2 would only stay solid at 1atm if ambient temp were something like -70F. That would be terra-forming in the form of Northern Canadian winter.

Additionally, Venus is only 70 percent the distance from the sun. The plants and animals would need 1000SPF or some very good radiation shielding atmosphere. But great thought experiment. Bring on the smart people.
"Great thought experiment." I agree. I knew I liked that post, but I didn't know how to explain why.

jimhabegger
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50321

Post by jimhabegger »

sp0tlight wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote:Xe needs to release another computer game and quick. I suggest a text-based adventure.
Matt, text adventures can be fun and are challenging to get right (I'm not talking "chose your own adventure" shit), I don't think "fun" is in their wheelhouse.
I signed up for Shadows of Isildur, but never actually played, because I never got past the character description stage.

sp0tlight
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50322

Post by sp0tlight »

Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote: Do not ever dis "Choose your Own Adventure" books! They were a key part of my formative years, and look what I've become...
Those had at least some editorial oversight and had to sell on a free marked. So I would not put them against titans like Depression Quest.
...Ok, point well taken.
Now when you've mentioned it I only once had a CYOA book. I really enjoyed it but I was maybe 14 so…

Shatterface
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50323

Post by Shatterface »

I'm reading Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald at the moment:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fBUlMNG7R94/V ... moonuk.jpg

It's a multigenerational saga set on the moon which has been compared to Dune (Lune) or A Game of Thrones (A Game of Domes) but its portrayal of sexuality touches on issues we discuss a lot.

Everyone is poly, and/or bisexual, or autosexual, or neuter, or two-spirits who think they are werewolves. Many have their own made-up pronouns.

But this is an economically libertarian colony: everything is paid for (water, air, data) and there is no welfare for the poor: you pay or you die.

And there's no criminal law or civil law, just contract law.

Everything is up for sale or negotiation.

It's like Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress only more so: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

And what's fascinating is that McDonald explicitly ties the polymorphous sexuality to the libertarian legal and economic system. Which is something Heinlein portrayed touched on too.

SJWs like to see sexual freedom is inherently left-wing, despite communisms persecution of sexual minorities, but really it's an extension of the free market into the bedroom.

VickyCaramel
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50324

Post by VickyCaramel »

Steersman wrote: "A pox on both your houses", indeed.
It certainly seems that was now, especially as the far left has taken up the Palestinian cause... and we know they they have a very casual relationship with the truth.

But it really is a little more complicated than that.
Even Hamas followed the PLO's policy of keeping their campaigns local, so any propaganda they put out is not aimed at the west, which means in effect they are preaching to the choir. Historically, if we are hearing Palestinian propaganda, we are receiving it through the Israeli propaganda machine.
The Israeli propaganda machine is extensive, Memri is not unique. Conversely, they strictly control information coming in and out of Palestine, mainly by manipulating the media's access to Palestine. This is why, if anything is going on in Palestine, invariably any news report is going to centred around a statement made by an IDF spokeswoman.

Electronic Intifada used to do a very good of debunking the Israeli propaganda, they had an archive which was a goldmine. You could say they are biased, but we at the slymepit are biased against Social Justice Warriors. It is a similar situation, the vast majority of propaganda, spin, outright lies and narrative is coming from one side.

sp0tlight
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50325

Post by sp0tlight »

Shatterface wrote: Everyone is poly, and/or bisexual, or autosexual, or neuter, or two-spirits who think they are werewolves. Many have their own made-up pronouns.

But this is an economically libertarian colony: everything is paid for (water, air, data) and there is no welfare for the poor: you pay or you die.
Ayn Rand, edited for 2016? Sounds like my worse nightmare.

Hunt
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50326

Post by Hunt »

jimhabegger wrote:
Hunt wrote:
katamari Damassi wrote:I've been reading the Red Rising books(think Hunger Games meets Red Mars). They're an enjoyable beach/airport read. It has me thinking about terraforming and I think Venus would be an easier job than Mars. I've just been doing simple math of percentages in my head and would need an actual smart person to really figure it out, but Venus has roughly 90x earth's atmospheric pressure, and 96% of its atmosphere is CO2. Erect a sunshade in space. I know it would be at least a couple thousand kilometers in diameter but it would only need to be a couple of molecules thick. The shade lowers the temp until the CO2 falls like snow. 96% of the atmosphere is now solid on the ground so the pressure is now near Earth's. Then use synthetic organisms or drones that can process the frozen CO2 into C and O2. The only real long term problem I can see is lack of water.
CO2 would only stay solid at 1atm if ambient temp were something like -70F. That would be terra-forming in the form of Northern Canadian winter.

Additionally, Venus is only 70 percent the distance from the sun. The plants and animals would need 1000SPF or some very good radiation shielding atmosphere. But great thought experiment. Bring on the smart people.
"Great thought experiment." I agree. I knew I liked that post, but I didn't know how to explain why.
It got me to thinking (damn you Katamari!) that a much better way to reign in a planet like Venus would be the proposed artificial methods to control global warming. Stratospheric sulfate aerosol seeding together with the introduction of photosynthesizing plants would bring the temp down and convert the CO2 into biomass. Of course, plant life would never survive the initial 500F daylight temp, but his strategy would essentially plunge the entire planet into nuclear winter, or something like an asteroid extinction event. The temps would plummet radically, eventually down to the terrestrial range.

Caveat: I don't really know what I'm talking about.

Phil_Giordana_FCD
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50327

Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

sp0tlight wrote:
Shatterface wrote: Everyone is poly, and/or bisexual, or autosexual, or neuter, or two-spirits who think they are werewolves. Many have their own made-up pronouns.

But this is an economically libertarian colony: everything is paid for (water, air, data) and there is no welfare for the poor: you pay or you die.
Ayn Rand, edited for 2016? Sounds like my worse nightmare.
I thought hard about this, and at last, shrugged.




Get it? Wink wink nudge nudge.

Hunt
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50328

Post by Hunt »

I mean "rein". Damn it, I hate promulgating that stupid error. It's almost as bad as begging the question wrong. Oh, and I apologize for getting affect/effect wrong yesterday.

Twenty lashes with a wet noodle.

I'm such a looser.

Aneris
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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50329

Post by Aneris »

ThreeFlangedJavis wrote:While there are factors that can prevent development of IQ potential and factors that can work in the opposite direction, the evidence is that there are highly heritable differences in intelligence.
I don't doubt that, but believe that cultural factors in sum make up a larger part, for which I cited Flynn Effect, or that learning and stimulation appear to have a large influence. All else being somewhat equal, heritability will come out strong, but it appears that both malnutrition (negatively) and stimuli or culture (positively) are factors. And I explained what I mean by that. It's very easily derailed into blank slate nonsense, but that's not what I wrote.
AndrewV69 wrote:
Aneris wrote:
VickyCaramel wrote:
  • Aneris wrote: What we call "intelligence", as measured in IQ points, is a polygenetic trait (depends on many genes), thus you can inherit your smarts to some degree from your parents, but it depends much more on environmental factors. [...]
Let me stop you right there! I have recently been hearing the exact opposite. I have heard it from various reliable sources, although I have not seen the research so I can't link you to it. But I have heard that recent research into twins and adopted children strongly indicates that the potential for intelligence is almost completely inherited, and there is virtually no influence that any environmental factors can have outside of malnutrition.

So before I can go any further down this path, I would have to weigh the evidence for BOTH intelligence being genetic and it being environmental and see which stacks up.
A quick glance... This is related to cognitive faculties, Flynn Effect and aging, but it appears relevant for your question.
Study wrote:In this respect, numerous individual-level studies have documented tremendous cognitive plasticity in the sense that cognitive performance has been improved using training interventions of different kinds (e.g., Hertzog, Kramer, Wilson, & Lindenberger, 2008; Mårtensson et al., 2012).
http://longevity3.stanford.edu/brainhea ... Effect.pdf

And I also found an article on the Wiki on the heritability of IQ. It says:
Heritability of IQ wrote:This [Flynn] effect can be explained by a generally more stimulating environment for all people. The authors suggest that programs aiming to increase IQ would be most likely to produce long-term IQ gains if they taught children how to replicate outside the program the kinds of cognitively demanding experiences that produce IQ gains while they are in the program and motivate them to persist in that replication long after they have left the program.
My goto guy on IQ and heritable traits is Razib Khan. For example Hoping for High Heritability of IQ
There is a second issue of more practical relevance, and that is that many people wish to reject a heritable component for intelligence. To be clear it is robust science that intelligence is 0.3 to 0.7 heritable. That means that 30 to 70 percent of the variation in intelligence in the population is due to variation in genes. Because the trait is highly polygenic, on the order of thousands of loci controlling variation in intelligence, it is difficult to pick any particular signal. But very few scientists are under the illusion that intelligence is not at least moderately heritable. A good analogy here is height, which is highly heritable, and controlled by many genes of small effect (the genetic architecture here is moderately more tractable from what I can tell). But for many people, especially in the public, they “need a gene.” It makes the abstract, ratio of additive genetic variance over total phenotypic variance, concrete.
On the Heritability of behavioral traits
For those of you who forgot, heritability is a population wide statistic which assesses the proportion of variation in the population you can attribute to heritable genetic variation. So if heritability is 1.0 all of the variation is due genetic variation; offspring are just a linear combination of their parents. If heritability is ~0.0, then there’s basically no correlation between parents and offspring. Though, as I said, heritability is a population-wide statistic, it can be informative on an individual level. For example, the heritabiilty of height is ~0.90 in the Western world. To give you a sense of the expected height of the offspring of two individuals, just take the average (in sex-controlled standard deviation units) and shift it back toward the mean by 10%. There is going to be a lot of variation around this average. The rule of thumb seems to be that the standard deviation across siblings is roughly similar to the standard deviation within the population (though it seems to be a bit lower, with sibling I.Q. deviations being 2/3 of the magnitude of population-wide deviations).
Someone into HDB is JayMan who says he is (in his about me section of his blog)
I am a second generation Jamaican-American of Black, White (English), Indian (Asian), and Chinese descent, living the motto “out of many, one people.”
Anyway, in Rebutting Chanda Chisala for example he goes on to say :
Second, Chisala seems to have no understanding of the concepts of elite samples, founder effects, measurement error, sampling bias, or of basic statistical principles like statistics of small numbers. That’s not even to mention his apparent lack of understanding of the breeder’s equation (but at least there he has plenty of company). He seems to be mystified by apparent incongruities he encounters in his cherry-picked (and often outdated) samples because of his ignorance of these important concepts and many other facts.
....
In any case, this recent nonsense idea of Chisala, aside from running afoul Occam’s Razor, is his attempt to undercut the rebuttal to the deprivation argument. That is, it is a common argument of blank slatists that poverty and other forms of deprivation are responsible for differences in average IQ and national performance. Aside from emptiness of the whole deprivation argument, as noted above, there is the fact (as pointed out by me in Welcome Readers from Portugal!) that outliers to this pattern of deprivation and IQ all perform in accordance to their measured IQ, not according to their level of deprivation. Poor rural Chinese perform nearly as well in IQ and scholastically as the other East Asian societies do. Citizens in wealthy Arab oil states perform as badly as those in poorer ones which lack oil. I’m sure Chisala doesn’t like this particular uncomfortable fact, so I suspect he concocted his feeble theory in part to try to nullify this unwelcome reality.

And finally, there is the fundamental problem that Chisala doesn’t understand either evolution or the formula that guides it, the breeder’s equation. There is no reason to suspect that human groups that have been separated for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments would be the same in all their cognitive and behavioral qualities. In fact, a priori we should expect them not to be, since such equivalence after so many generations of separate evolution is nigh impossible.
Follow the links, read the whole thing, read the papers and articles that they link to etc. and that should keep you busy for awhile. Be aware that they both assume a certain "basic" knowledge of the subjects including genetics, micro biology etc. and you could find yourself six hours or more still exploring the subject.
I did explore it on the other end, hence I wrote about the Flynn Effect. I am also — once again — not of the blank slate persuasion. There is a reason though why academia moved away from nurture vs nature dichotomies, for they can be misleading. In the second reply you appear to agree ...
AndrewV69 wrote:Oh culture is important alright. I was amazed to discover when I first arrived in Canukistan that the children who went to public shcool in blue collar place like Brampton for example had an anti-academic culture. <snip>
My explanation for this is the analogy to colour perception. Some argue it's “mostly paint” the other say it's “all light”, but each of these views are nonsensical in isolation. You can say that blue paint gives you a blue wall, under certain light (which features the blue spectrum).

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by sp0tlight »

Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote: I thought hard about this, and at last, shrugged.
You are a real fountain… head of jokes.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Phil_Giordana_FCD »

I've never actually read her shit. Just what people say about it. Maybe I'll give it a try sometimes, but if the main hero is to be a corporate bastard, I don't think I'll enjoy it much.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Billie from Ockham »

Really? wrote:How wonderful! I disagree! If someone were to remove "unapproved signs" or something, it should be security or administration. Professors are charged with...let's see if I can say this with a straight face...allowing students to express any nonviolent thought or opinion they like, good or bad, because college is a place where you can try on any nonviolent opinion you like and so on.
This varies across schools (in the US). I've had jobs at schools where profs are told to leave such things to administrators and/or security, which matches what you wrote, but I've also been at a school where all profs are also administrators, where I was supposed to do things like tear down posters that were either unapproved or in the wrong place.
Really? wrote:This is the same as Melissa Click or that insane person who destroyed the student's pro-life signs. You may disagree, professor, but students have the right to document and report experiences and to express themselves unless they verge into the kind of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment.
No-one denies that the students had the right to film the prof tearing down the posters ... the prof didn't seem to have a problem with this, either. This isn't even close to a parallel with Melissa Click.

As to the right to express yourself: the 1st-A does not give you right to put posters on any and all public buildings. Content-neutral restrictions, including bans on putting posters on the walls of public buildings, telephone poles, etc, have been ruled to be constitutional.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by sp0tlight »

Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:I've never actually read her shit. Just what people say about it. Maybe I'll give it a try sometimes, but if the main hero is to be a corporate bastard, I don't think I'll enjoy it much.
I don't think it's a great literature, or even good. I don't think you'd read whole AS with any pleasure. Still, at certain age, it's really pervasive narrative. I think it has more cultural cachet in USA since it puts more emphasis on capital and radical individualist freedom. It's a Great Man theory of history casted on a free market principles.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Billie from Ockham »

Really? wrote:"I was wrong to destroy the students' signs, speech that was protected by the First Amendment. In the future, I will not punish students for having opinions that differ from mine."
The video provides zero evidence that she took the signs down because she disagreed with their message. She explicitly gave a diffeernt reason: that signs cannot be posted on buildings without permission and the posters in question did not have a stamp that indicated approval.

Now, if you somehow know that permission to post is not being given in a content-neutral manner AND that she is on the committee that didn't approved these particular signs, then your point against her might stand, but a little digging will reveal that the YAF group did not even ask for permission to post and wasn't an approved group in the first place.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by comhcinc »

Phil_Giordana_FCD wrote:I've never actually read her shit. Just what people say about it. Maybe I'll give it a try sometimes, but if the main hero is to be a corporate bastard, I don't think I'll enjoy it much.
Her books are awful. Just poorly written. She used her books to express her philosophy and made that the propriety of her writing.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Billie from Ockham »

Really? wrote:
bovarchist wrote:Get off it. There's nothing unreasonable or oppressive about rules about where and when you can post things. Nobody's being punished in any way. And how is 'Remember 911' an opinion anyway? And what evidence do you have that the professor disagrees with it?
The professor is on record as stating that 9/11 was the result of Western colonialism.
Please don't use arguments like the above. It's embarrassing.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Service Dog »

All subway lines from Queens (except the 7) are stopped due to power outage. So Im taking the Long Island Railroad above ground. first chance to sit & browse pit, in a while. good to see the shives shoop & a mention of my man Heinlein, first thing.

Today's 12 hour shift will put me at 88 hours for the week... 48 hours of OT!

The fashion party was lavish & elegant, but also full of overly tanned Kardashian type people. But Patti Smith came & painter Chuck Close. Working inside Cartier has been interesting. I wore a black suit, secret service earpiece & ridiculous gold anchor medallion, plus a moustache halfway between John Waters & Freddie Mercury. And scrapped my cheekbone shaving, so I looked like Id been punched. City Ballet performed & Beyonce's protoges Halle & Chloe. Plus a white woman singer whose name I cant recall. The xecor xownstairs was like an 1800s French kitchen. Upstairs looked like 1950s mambo club blurring into 70s & 80s... like American Hustle.

Tomorrrow off, then 5 overnights for a runway show I cant disclose until its over.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50338

Post by sp0tlight »

Service Dog wrote:Today's 12 hour shift will put me at 88 hours for the week... 48 hours of OT!
Hope you get something extra for that. 88 hours a week is just soul crashing bad.
I wore a black suit, secret service earpiece & ridiculous gold anchor medallion, plus a moustache halfway between John Waters & Freddie Mercury.
Oh my, leave that for Finland Friday.
Tomorrrow off, then 5 overnights for a runway show I cant disclose until its over.
Your work ethics, I wish I had them.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

#50339

Post by Billie from Ockham »

Really? wrote:
bovarchist wrote:Get off it. There's nothing unreasonable or oppressive about rules about where and when you can post things. Nobody's being punished in any way. And how is 'Remember 911' an opinion anyway? And what evidence do you have that the professor disagrees with it?
The professor is on record as stating that 9/11 was the result of Western colonialism.
I didn't read the above carefully before commenting (ripping) on it. bovarchist asked you a question and you answered. I should only have said that bovarchist's question was irrelevant and not attacked you for answering it. Sorry, Really.

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Re: The Refuge of the Toads

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Post by Kirbmarc »

Steersman wrote:Looks like a bit of an ipse dixit or weasel words or shading into some post-modernism: "it's all just narratives, man!" Issue seems less a question of interpretation than whether it can be construed as fact or not that Allah wrote the Quran.
It's more complicated than that. There are many different schools of interpretation in Islam. No one of that is particularly "modern", but they differ a lot in their interpretation of the "word of God". Not even the literalists can be 100% literalists, because the Qu'ran is full of internal contradictions. There is enough wiggle room for interpretations that apply the rules of Islam only to muslims and don't call for the death of apostates or for a muslim takeover of society. They're not particularly popular interpretations these days, of course, especially among Sunnis. And they're not going to become popular if we allow foreign preachers paid by theocracies to take control of muslim communities in the "West".
"You keep using that word [theocracy] ...." It's "a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god"; Islam is fundamentally not a religion but a totalitarian form of government. One that is intrinsically antithetical to the principles of democracy and human rights.
Since you love definitions so much, Islam isn't a form of government until it has institutions that support it. Would you call a group of three muslims of three different denominations "a form of government"?

There are many Muslim-based theocracies, but not all muslims live in theocracies.
In case you hadn't noticed it, it's been some time since Christianity has attempted to impose a theocracy. And the US Constitution more or less precludes it. Part of the warp and woof of Islam, bred in the bone. You're trying, somewhat desperately by the look of it, to compare apples and aardvarks.
The US constitution, and other constitutions in liberal democracies prevent any religion from taking over the institutions of liberal democracies.

And it's not been such a long time since christians have tried to impose a theocracy: supporters ofdominion theology are still active in the US (thankfully restrained by US laws and institutions, so they can't do too much damahe), while Lord's Resistance Army is involved in a war to turn Uganda, Congo and South Sudan into christian theocracies.

Christianity these days is far better than Islam because it's been tamed by roughly two and a half centuries of slow, gradual, and non-linear secularization, but it's still not completely harmless everywhere.
Of course - we've discussed it many times and at some length. But it's still somewhat of a strawman when it comes to the issue of the compatibility between Islam and democracy - you and Nawaz and Rizvi and Aslan and Namazie and Ansar and innumerable others, although I'll concede there's a spectrum there, can blather on about "reforming Islam" till the cows come home, but it still doesn't address that question.
That's because the question itself ("Is Islam compatible with democracy?") is by and large impossible to answer, since it considers "Islam" as a monolithic whole and doesn't make it clear what "compatibility" means. If you're talking about a political system based on the Qu'ran then no, such a regime isn't compatible with liberal democracy (neither is one based on the bible, or on Karl Marx's Das Kapital or on the Mein Kampf). But individual muslims don't make a political regime by themselves.

A better question is whether it's possible for muslims to accept the principles of liberal democracy, and I think that the answer to that it's possible, but very hard, and relatively easier if we uphold those principles, defend them from preachers of violence and subversion, teach them to everyone who wishes to stay in a liberal democracy and punish those who violate them.

[quote="KirbmarcI have "addressed the questions above", and have done so many times - and have generally provided explicit evidence to justify my answers and positions. But while you say you've "addressed countless times" that question, it seems you tend to dance around the issue rather than confronting it head on. Although I'll concede that your recent "Islam based on Qu'ran literalism is incompatible with liberal democracy" is a commendable step in the right direction. But the crux of the matter there is that that literalism is an essential element of Islam, the sine qua non. Rizvi talks, presumably, a great game in his new book, The Atheist Muslim but that looks like an oxymoron, a "deepity", an egregiously false profundity that ignores if not tries to whitewash away that element. How else can "moderate" Muslims possibly "revere" a book that endorses "misogyny, murder or homophobia" unless they see it as literally written by Allah "Himself"?[/quote]

It's not "a step in the right direction", it's what I've always said. Whether literalism is an "essential" element of Islam depends on what people think about it. Religions have no unchangeable "essence", they change through time. Religions are sects of ideas and behaviors, and they are a social construct. You seem to agree with fundamentalists who see their religion as a unchangeable "truth" which has always been the same and will always be the same, historic evidence be damned.

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