New Testingstan

Zod wrote:

Knubfuck wrote:Only a fucking simpleton would think that soldier who voted for Ron Paul was speaking for the entire military. He probably wore the uniform show that yes, even soldiers dislike the wars.

You should visit the comments section on MSNBC sometime.

I don't read comments on news stories anymore. The very idea of allowing readers to comment makes no sense given the vitriol that accompanies it.

Perhaps because all you can see is hate. In not one comment in this extremely slanted article do I see anything that says Santorum hates anyone. I see a man who will do what we need to have done in this country. We need an Iran hawk instead of an Arab bower like we now have. We need someone who will cut stupid entitlement programs. We need someone who will stop kowtowing to special interests and special classes of people. I can conceive of him as President.

Amazing that the press, supposedly charged with reporting, comments either negatively or positively, depending on the agenda. Not a word about the fact that Obama has no past, no past girlfriends, not one person who is willing to step up and say they recall him at Columbia. Not one person who was at his wedding. A groomsman, or anyone?!!!Any photos of his dating Michele? Where did they meet? Anything?

We're STILL waiting to learn about Obama's record. He apparently HAS NO history... that he wants scrutinized, anyway. The little we do know about Obama and his affiliations, is enough to tell us he never should have been elected. Too guarded, too slippery.

Santorum is the closest candidate to Ronald Reagan I've seen since the great communicator. Go Rick.

Let's see:

(MSNBC really should have titled the article "Top 11 reasons to Hate Rick if your a liberal)

Rick is a Conservative. Pro lifer. Strong on national defense. Anti Government. Against gay marriages. Strong on Family Values. A devout Christian. Anti-Iran. Pro Israel. Strong on legal immigration, but stronger on border control and illegal immigration. Small government, less taxes....

yeah, the liberals are going to love hating this guy and will be extreme and vicious in their attacks. They will go after all 7 of his kids, his wife, their neighbors, their "legal" Italian immigrant parents. Rick stands for everything the extreme liberal left and Obama are against...

Power to you Rick and prepare for the slaughter. Take them on, because you're their better..

and for the moneyshot

If B. Hussein Obama couldn't handle the job of being POTUS, then he should've never run for it in the first place. I mean this is the Leftist, Liberal, Socialist, Marxist, Democrat, "Community Organizer" who promised that he would cut the U.S. Federal Deficit IN HALF by the end of his first term (He's doubled it in less than THREE YEARS) as POTUS.

He promised that his Obamacare, socialized medicine scheme, would decrease the cost of health care and health insurance once passed and since its passage, the cost of health care and health insurance has gone nothing, but UP.

B. Hussein Obama also promised he would close down GITMO, which he never did and won't ever do.
He also promised that if the U.S. Economy didn't turn around in three years, from him taking office as POTUS, then his presidency would likely be a "one term deal." (See YouTube) Not only has the U.S. Economy NOT TURNED AROUND, but it's gotten exponentially worse since this no-good, inexperienced, unqualified, Leftist, Liberal, Socialist, Marxist, Democrat, "Community Organizer" took office.

Now what IS REALISTIC, is instead of making excuses and apologies for "poor ole Barack," why not hold him ACCOUNTABLE for his THREE YEARS OF ABJECT FAILURE AS POTUS??!! If you Left wing, Nut Job Kooks were so wise and knowledgeable in the "truths of life" why would you let this Left wing skunk hold the most powerful office in the world, much less the United States of America, a minute longer than you had, as an American voter, with his FAILED performance on the U.S. Economy as POTUS, so far by voting for him?

Neither the Republican party, nor Fox News, nor Rush Limbaugh, nor Sean Hannity, nor Ann Coulter, nor etc. made those promises of JOBS, ECONOMIC PROSPERITY FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS AND HEALTHCARE COSTS BEING REDUCED FOR ALL, B. Hussein Obama made ALL those promises back in 2008.

And when B. Hussein Obama made those promises, he never promised the American people, "blame Bush" strategies, he never promised the American people excuses for the U.S. Economy and Joblessness not improving under his non-leadership, he never promised the American people that he would simply demonize and dehumanize his political opponents and/or allow his political cronies to do so, like Jimmy Hoffa Jr., without speaking out against that. He promised the American people Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and at least an improvement in the U.S. Economy, Housing Market and declining property values, that we'd already see AFTER THREE YEARS in the White House. The reason we don't see any improvement in the U.S. Economy is simple, his policies don't work!!

Admit it already. B. Hussein Obama is one of the worst U.S. Presidents in the history of this nation and certainly in most of our lifetimes. This guy makes Jimmy Carter looks like a good, sound, fiscal conservative, for goodness sakes. STOP MAKING EXCUSES, HOLD B. HUSSEIN OBAMA RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS OWN PRESIDENCY. IF THE U.S. ECONOMY WAS GOING REALLY GOOD RIGHT NOW, AND JOB CREATION WAS WAY UP, WOULD YOU BE GIVING FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH THE CREDIT FOR IT? OR WOULD YOU BE GIVING B. HUSSEIN OBAMA THE CREDIT FOR IT?

SO IF YOU WOULD GIVE OBAMA THE CREDIT IF THE U.S. ECONOMY WERE GOING GREAT RIGHT NOW AFTER HIS THREE YEARS AS POTUS, THEN YOU SHOULD ALSO GIVE HIM THE BLAME FOR THE U.S. ECONOMY REMAINING AWFUL RIGHT NOW AND EVEN BECOMING EXPONENTIALLY WORSE UNDER HIS NON-LEADERSHIP..PERIOD...END OF STORY.

i need to stop posting in n&p

i'm falling behind on my work


but at what point does it become a dogpile? i hit preview and find two more snipers coming in to call me a troll

the "it's obvious" remarks are kind of an lol

adr wrote:i need to stop posting in n&p

you just need to pick your battles better really

i'm with you on most things but i'm not sure it would be desirable to allow any public servant to voice their personal opinions while they're on active duty and wearing uniforms

to be fair to you though you're fighting the sdnet brains trust so admittedly i'm not entirely on their side either; whatever bobalot tends to say i almost think the complete opposite just on natural inclination

Just gotta stop posting on sdn entirely really

I mean playing an MMO involves embarrassing just as many fat people but doesn't take up your time so bad

Stofsk wrote:i'm with you on most things but i'm not sure it would be desirable to allow any public servant to voice their personal opinions while they're on active duty and wearing uniforms

eeeeh i don't quite agree as i've been saying there but i am starting to see where the other opinion comes from

what's more important than agreeing or not is figuring out why - what set of principles and what reasoning led to that decision?

it's a pity the sdnetters aren't smarter since i really think i could learn from people who put up better fights, whether directly from their input or by them forcing me to think about my own position in a new way

instead it's more like "see who can type faster and maek moar trite insults"

That's the joke dude

I've learned more and had more interesting discussions that have shifted my views investing than the main board

Why?

Because most of the tryhards don't post there

Except maya bird that is lol

starku wrote:I've learned more and had more interesting discussions that have shifted my views investing than the main board

Welcome to newvestingstand, home of a curtain click.

do we do investings here as well

i would buy shares but i can't afford to atm

Someone call an exterminator

We've got an investation

adr wrote:but at what point does it become a dogpile? i hit preview and find two more snipers coming in to call me a troll

It's amazing at the number of people who appear to follow you from thread-to-thread to dogpile you.

But the real sad part is thier arguements have tend to have all the rigor and complexity of a screeching toddler.

not to mention to call him a troll

Stofsk wrote:not to mention to call him a troll

That type of behaviour used to be rigorously stamped out, but apparently they don't make moderators like the used to.

Stofsk wrote:not to mention to call him a troll

To be fair, Adam often does troll. It's just their failure to see the valid points that he illustrates with his trolling.

i just wrote up what i think is a sufficiently strong counter argument to my original point

i'm not sure what's worse: that i didn't see this myself a few pages ago, or that none of the... what six other people in that thread... made that argument or something similar.


anyway if i don't get back to bed i'll have a headache

You know you're in the intellectual crucible when you can post 'if you weren't I'M A JUGGALO WOOP WOOP the counter to my position is xyz'

I wonder if a government employee would be allowed to say he has "political opinion x y and z" that happens to agree with everything the republican party says, just as long as he doesn't mention anything or anyone by name.

If not, we have a situation where government workers do not have a right to free speech for eight hours of the day, unless they happen to be elected officials, ie. the employers.

This of course is an interesting reflection of the private sector, where workers voicing their political opinions often also leads to bad personal consequences (even if they do it on Facebook in their spare time), while the employer has no such limitations.


Ultimately, there is something funny about the public needing to be "protected" from hearing police officers saying "i personally think x", but not from police officers brutally suppressing protesters. It would not be unreasonable to assume that if the police officers wanted to protest off-duty they too would be suppressed. So it seems to me that the only ones with truly free speech are the supposedly democratically elected parts of government, and those that supply them with money. But how can they be truly democratically elected if the range of opinions that are allowed to be disseminated into the public awareness is severely limited, both by forcibly silencing grass-roots movements, and silencing through regulation those to whom people might listen due to their perceived authority (not that giving people that kind of power would be good), and silencing the rest through the nature of the corporate owned mass media?

no wonder everything's fucked

When you sign up to teh CF it's explicitly explained that your waving a number of civil rights, including; free speech, association and movement.

Canada is most certainly not a fucked up nation but I can't help but think that if someone sees a Cpl on TV and goes "the entire Army endorses Ron Paul" their a fucking idiot. Even if the Joint Chiefs stood up and said that, you'd be an idiot to believe them. That said, best the military stay out of politics unless you want Egypt or Pakistan.

what's the definition of active duty btw?

is that someone employed full time by the military, or is he only on active duty for the time he actually spends at work?

bing suggests that it is the former

and if that's the one, that list just posted in the thread goes WAY beyond even what i concede as justified for perceptions

even if it's only while at work it goes into deep bullshit territory


meh i'm losing the will to fight in these threads though. i need to catch up on work now

I think it only applies to reservists, essentially deployed or being employed full time. Its not a term we use so I'm kinda guessing

"Active duty" when used alone tends to describe the full time soldiers, or what would otherwise be termed as the Regular Army. They get to stay in barracks or if off-post get the BAH/BAS allowances and all the other benefits of the service.

There's also Guard and Reserve personnel who do work full time and would be referred to as "Active Guard Reserve". They too would receive the same benefits and allowances as AD troops. You have to be prior service for this, though. It's not something you enlist in straight up.

Then there's the normal Guard and Reserve who get themselves mobilized and thus become active duty for whatever the duration of their mobilization is.

Dooey Jo wrote:"tension" is the word i think most languages use for "voltage"

which actually is a pretty stupid word

you gonna call resistance "ohmage" next?

weight = "poundage"?

holy shit was that actually a word???

oh dear it actually means weight too

outside of high school i usually saw it referred to as potential difference rather than voltage

although that was more from the physics side of things than electronics

Darth Tedious wrote:

Stofsk wrote:not to mention to call him a troll

To be fair, Adam often does troll. It's just their failure to see the valid points that he illustrates with his trolling.

I know, but I'm referring to those that call him a troll in order to ignore and dismiss whatever he writes.

Honestly though I don't think Adam really trolls all that much. Maybe I'm just too biased in his favour to see it, but a lot of the time I tend to see what he writes as honestly held beliefs, even if I disagree with them. I think a big part of that is it comes through in his writing (at least to me) that he's thought about those beliefs a lot, but he's also amenable to changing them, like now he's arguing against himself in that stupid thread. A lot of other posters tend to stick to their guns fiercely and refuse to concede or adapt their positions, which I guess is seen as a sign of weakness. Guys like Patrick Degan for example will take the party line on just about any subject you can think of really. Same goes for Alyrium and a bunch of others.

Degan's a great example now that I think about it. He'll accuse anyone of a number of fallacies, but will commit them himself as part of his argument. It strikes me that if you're going to have an honest debate with someone, you'd be aware of what you're writing as well as what they're writing, and so stuff like that shouldn't happen all that much. I guess the TOB style of 'debate' gets in the way of that.

Some of them are honestly held, some of them are undecided positions being explored in a trial by fire, and some of them are meant to get a fuller understanding of the picture.

Most of it is some combination. If I troll, it's generally an issue of wording or timing rather than the substance points themselves. For instance, I'll have several possible counter-arguments prepared, but instead of presenting them myself, I'll hold on to them to laugh at the idiots who didn't apparently didn't think it through before posting.


But, among the recent ones:

Ron Paul is undecided. I'm running with that position as a way to evaluate it.

Pacifism is honestly held.

Freedom of speech is honestly held; I reaaaally don't like those rules, and apparently my understanding of them now isn't actually their intent, so if I proceed, it's going to be on the understanding line. But it strikes me as tyranny.

My ethics change a lot, so you could say I'm undecided. I've had some concerns with utilitarianism, though I ran with that for a long time, including arguments like the ends justify the means (and don't forget: side effects count as ends too), rights are just emergent properties of the utilitarian calculus, repugnant conclusions are by definition ethical; that we find them repugnant is an error since the math is good, and stuff like that.


I still have a big chunk of that in the system, but I'm quite recently shifting back toward saying rights are fundamental, not just a general rule that arises from the math, and completely universal, something my gut has always said but I never really considered it as formally workable until that thread with Straha a few weeks ago (and now I'm on the other side: defining "life" is too fuzzy, so sidestepping it is desirable, and the consequences - lol in context - of fucking it up aren't good.)

But this shift is a big reason why I've been getting into a lot of these more recent things like the arguments about abortion (I laid out my current position in the ron paul thread - it's undesirable, but controlling people is worse, as is the practical effect relating to the systemic sexism of our society, so I'm pro-choice too) and tyranny, including...

Secession, which is discussed for a combination of reasons. I want to be able to argue both sides of that for my imaginary worldbuilding fluff, but I lean pro-secessionist myself. If you don't want to be a part of something anymore, it seems natural that you should be allowed to leave. So the question becomes: is that actually fair in practice, does it work if you apply it universally, and/or does it do more harm than good?

Me thinks GOLDEN MEAN FALLACY the best answer is somewhere in the middle: yes, it's a good idea, but there's so many other factors involved in implementation that the general rule might best be to just say no.

Obvious followup: what about the implementation of just saying no? War = evil.


(This is why Degan and I have no chance of agreeing with his argument approach: He's saying this right doesn't exist at all, and I'm saying it does. What he fails to understand is that no amount of evidence or documentation is going to change that; it's more philosophical than historical or legal.

I guess I could try to explain this to him instead of saying "I don't care, fucktard" but it'd probably give the same result.

Legally, though, I think we're both right, at least before Texas v White: if the right doesn't exist, the constitution doesn't create it, and if it does exist, the constitution specifically allows it to continue, in the hands of the states and/or people.)





hey guys i'm totally a great philosopher