New Testingstan

Nietzslime wrote:probably

in other news i right now consider familiarizing myself with the canadian electronic band austra over the course of a brief nightrun to be more important than engaging in that morality thread further

ehhhh sharing is caring

Ok, I'm at work now. Let's try not to have another bannathon in the next 8 hours.

it isn't a banathon until 26 ppl are martyred

it is currently merely a quadriban

one more and it is a BANNING SPREE

bantacular

bangasm?

M-M-M-M-MONSTER BAN

Ban-kai

looks like we've got a banzai

The "enlightened western society" with its democracy and individual freedoms was made possible by technology. Could you have democracy before the printing press? I doubt it; democracy requires widespread public knowledge.

What the fuck?

Ran into that while checking to see if there was any more fallout from the morality thread shenanigans. I thought it a notable enough statement to be worth preservation for posterity.

well beyond a certain scale, that's probably true

hahaha oh wow

deserve's got nothing to do with it


http://youtube.com/watch?v=dpDkYZWeeVg

Really what is notworthy here. The ban or what we learned about Wong?

that buck and destro are now free

untill all men are free we are all slaves

free from this mortal coil

i'll see you in hell

lolololol

so i do have one regret

i should have used my last post there to use the commando quote


"yeah that's right wong, you said you'd ban me last!"


and see if he replies appropriately

"won't you join me.... on my journey into HELL" *slams self detonate button*

that would have been pretty cool

Shroom Man 777 wrote:i mean, only like OT and testing are forums that aren't dedicated to, or originated from, people arguing the fuck out of each other

for the other main boards:

SWvsST is explanatory
OSF was full of blergh gigajoules
NP is all blargh luberals blargh rethuglicrons etc.
SLAM is creationoreligulons lol africon origins stfu

i guess the breakdowns, dramas and animosities is a natural outcome of the origins of that place as a psycho internet argument killing field

A lot of the other forums are like that sometimes. It's just a question of having people who are themselves chill, and can talk chill.

History doesn't work because Thanas isn't chill, so that forum ends up pretty dead. OSF gets cluttered with Connor's gigajoules threads sure, but even he can lighten up sometimes, and some of the others like Ahriman are usually OK. SWvsST is calm and has been for a long time because nobody gives a damn. Except for occasional new tryhards, and a few old regulars who just can't give it up, but they're like the Japanese holdouts who were still occasionally yelling BANZAI and stealing shit on Pacific islands in the 1960s. Nobody cares one way or the other. Most of the stuff that still shows up in there isn't really even versus, it's just... people talking about Star Wars and Star Trek at the same time.

N&P is very blargh and dumb, and would need a lot of work... but honestly, quite a bit of this blarghing has been done by people who are themselves right here and are supposed to be chill otherwise, so I don't think that's an old guard problem or anything.

SLAM is occasionally blargh and dumb, but usually not, it just goes to shit when someone says something silly and people can't take a joke. On the whole I'd say it's not making things worse. N&P is the real problem.

Jung wrote:The thing that strikes me about SDN and philosophy

Imagine the reaction somebody would get if he started arguing with Alyrium about biology or Darth Wong about engineering while having only basic layman knowledge of the subject

But when it comes to philosophy everyone feels free to pontificate away as if their random layman's opinion is just as good as anyone else's, if not as if they're hot shit. If anybody gets extra respect it's Darth Wong and the other big names, not people who actually have background in the field. In fact I pick up more than a little thinly veiled contempt for philosophy as a field (any philosophy that isn't secular humanist a morally bankrupt philosophy in practice anyway).

The double standard is just striking.

One is that they don't have a lot of really good philosophers. There's no one on SDN who is to philosophy what Alyrium is to biology, or if there is, that person is probably not talking very much.

They have a bunch of people who can turn out walls of blather and look down on people with different degrees, but good philosophy is hard to come by. Especially since a lot of 20th century philosophy gets really foggy and murky and is better for having really long conversations in coffeehouses that don't go anywhere than it is for settling ethical questions. Ethics is a field that has kind of stagnated for a while, and that makes laymen more likely to assert their own authority.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:the problem is the board was predicated on people shitting on each other and gloating and posturing about it, that's the board's identity

Yeah, this. I think a lot of SDN's problems are fundamental cultural issues that flow from Darth Wong and company's vision of what they want the board to be. If you really want to improve the place you'd have to improve the culture, and improving the culture means going against what its creators and the people in charge of it want it to be ... and I think today's events give us an idea of what that would look like.

Doing it by defying and mocking people for having bad culture is just dumb. It serves the morally-superior-martyr complex, not the goal.

Even a lot of the assholes on the board are people you can have a conversation with, if you don't show up with a big chip on your shoulder. And have at least some actual writing ability so you can tune an argument to an audience instead of always responding to everything the same way and pissing off people that response doesn't work for.

And if your ambition is to improve the culture, you should be good enough as a poster that this is not too difficult, not beyond your powers. That's what I think.

And it can work. At least, it works as long as the owner of the board isn't doing absurd self-parodic Wongzilla bullshit every other week.

pieman, who are you?