BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

uziq wrote:

Jay wrote:

uziq wrote:

blind faith is the prevailing norm. it has never been any different, whether people followed the 'elect' of clergy who were fortunate enough to go to university and gain ancient greek and logic via scholasticism or today's technocratic elite of scientists and legalese-wielding bureaucrats. belief in atheism is a thing, for god's sake. belief isn't even the best word for it -- you're discussing ideology, pure and simples. you should really read some critiques of ideology by the likes of foucault or althusser. embrace marxism. it's the underdog source of the best critiques of all the dominant/ruling ideologies that have prevailed in modern society.

what's quite an interesting thought is that, over 15 years of posting, some well-known members are perhaps approaching their early senility. it is very possible that the insipidities muttered by jay and shahter et al, their befuddled reasoning, their glassy-eyed, vacant 'ideals', all the faux-hegelian proto-babble we had to put up with 10 years ago in the halcyon days of various randianisms and libertarianisms, were an exhibition of their peak intellectual performance. we didn't realise it at the time, but that was the best they were ever going to get. people have been posting here long enough to track their measurable decline.

What's most interesting to me is that you haven't evolved past regurgitating what your professors espoused in college. Your beliefs have remained locked in stasis. You're approaching 30, yes? There's nothing sadder than a middle aged liberal burnout. You still have time.

i have never been liberal, haha.

and what is it professors are supposed to put in students heads? we don’t have the same stereotypes about ‘cultural marxist’ professors raising campus cults. you’ve been reading too much jordan peterson.

i’m sure a little consistency puzzles you. you’ve aggrandized every political view possible as if they’re baseball cards. it takes a certain sort of stupid to veer all over the spectrum in the way you have.

Jay wrote:

I've been rather consistent in my beliefs.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2018-10-20 16:53:30)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Jay wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

It's always weird to see environmentalism be called a "religion." Seems a convenient, monolithic tag for when you want to spook readers and tinfoilers with a sinister conspiracy theory.

Modern environmentalism has been set up in much the same way that Christianity was set up. We're presented with various Armageddon scenarios and given a prescribed way of living our lives in order to stave it off.

However environmental armageddon is very likely to be real, whereas Beelzebub rising from the ground and laying waste to non-believers less so.

And its not as if 'the Right' didn't sensationalise things so far that they were able to fool the public into supporting wars which burned up trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Charging 5c for a plastic bag doesn't really compare does it?

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

Last edited by SuperJail Warden (2018-10-21 12:54:36)

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

I'd rather talk about sentencing reform that would positively impact more people, or demilitarizing the police.

Meh you never cared about any of that shit ever here anyway. That's just a dodge. Hoodrats in jail are not your tranny shield.

Last edited by uziq (2018-10-21 15:27:08)

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

They could charge $5 per plastic bag and it wouldn't bother me. Canvas totes are far more durable and won't tear apart like plastic bags when your bottle of maple syrup tips over and pressures the side. I honestly don't see what Jay thinks he's missing out on. Is he in such a poor way that it severely impacts his wallet, or is it a matter of feeling entitled to a half dozen free shopping bags every time he buys some stuff?

Also, people have tried to talk to god all their lives without receiving an answer. You can buy materials for a few reproducible science projects at your local grocery and carry them home in your five cent plastic bags. I get that some in the "yeah, science" crowd back it without an inkling of what constitutes science, but that doesn't take away from science so much as it does from the ignorant. I don't understand how people selling fair trade stone-ground, non-GMO corn chips is supposed to invalidate the threat of global climate change. I think comparing it 1:1 to religion is unfairly diminishing.

edit:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

You all should be using resuable hemp grocery bags and walking to the local grocery. If you can't carry it in one trip, you don't need it.

Costco just gives you repurposed cardboard boxes.

Jay wrote:

Many people, the majority really, take what is published about science as fact. They take it on faith that what some expert is telling them is indeed true. Faith is the premise upon which religions are founded. Unquestioning belief. No, what science is supposed to be is skepticism. Doubt. If someone tells you the sky is blue you test it, you theorize it, you investigate it. You don't take what they have to say on faith. There have been far too many times that the media has published reports based on faulty research and caused hysteria.

The push for straw bans is simply the latest hysteria. Nevermind that when you look under the covers you see that the research was conducted by a 9 year old boy doing a telephone survey to arrive at his numbers, or that only 2% of the plastic trash that ends up in the Pacific Ocean originates in the US, with those very same straws making up a microscopic fraction of the total pollution. That skepticism to hysteria where the underlying facts were rooted out is where the real science was performed.