Is there an echo in here?

@myconv, keep fighting the good fight and don't let them aggravate you with their inflammatory attacks. You're right in many ways, even though they gish gallop and dance around the real issues. The truth is of course that laissez-faire free market capitalism has been shown time and again to be inferior to a government interventionist one. This is where it gets interesting - the libertarians quaintly will refuse to define socialism and whether it can exist with a market based economy. THis is because in their minds this is a trap - if they agree socialism is defined as per rightwing US politicians, then the success stories of these socialist countries like the Nordics is undeniable or at least very hard to dispute. If on the other hand actual socialism cannot have a market based economy, and has the traditional stricter definition, then not even China is socialist and they lose the argument simply because socialism then is not even worth a thought, certainly not a 'threat' - after all, nobody is advocating for it and nobody is practising it thus. It's a lose-lose situation for them, because that's all they care about, winning and 'owning the libs', instead of an honest discussion about the merits of government intervention in society.

I always find it funny when 'libertarians' touting for freedom expose themselves as nothing more than rightwing conspiracy and propaganda nuts. They will start referencing Jordan Peterson (calling him Dr., because of course why not, a phd in social sciences demands respect) as a beacon of pseudo-intellectualism (except without the pseudo in their mind) and advocate for science-denialist things like race science or claiming climate science is bogus. Almost indistinguishable from the (alt/far) right, despite wanting to be called centrist, they have prejudice oozing from their pores. These are the same people who can't even call the Capitol incident an 'attack', putting it in single quotes (you know who you are even in this thread), revealing their immense hypocrisy and prejudice in the matter. Hardly surprising to be honest - they have to sleep at night somehow after all without having their brains explode from all the contradictions. I won't go too much into detail with the absolute atroscities being committed in the so-called beacons of freedom countries more than to say, if it's evil you want to fight, maybe start in your own backyard first.

Sounds like you might find Ultima 4 worth playing, then. (Though note that you *have* to be good if you want to beat the game.)

Looks like it's a special pickup week.
(those weeks when the big amounts of trash gets set on the curb)

=-=-=-=

Someday I might get to it(I like the look and such of the series, anyways)....first I gotta crack into the rest of my backlog, though. :)

To be fair, I think Jordan Peterson is a person worth listening to in his field of speciality which is clinical psychology (not politics or climate science) where he has amassed a lot of accolades.

Of course, as with anyone really, one has to exert critical judgement on the things he's saying (in terms of climate science, he's about as much an authority as anyone who is not a phd in that field).

While he certainly likes to harp on the left a lot (by which he really means the extreme left, but he "conveniently" just calls it the left, which introduces a lot of confusion), he actually cares about debate and makes some interesting points (unlike "lets ridicule students for fun & profit" talking heads like Shapiro).

1. If you want to discuss philosophy, I would advise that you do it by publishing papers in established scientific journals, rather than discussing it with people on GOG forums. I would also suggest you try to earn some money from it.

2. I already said I don't give a damn about Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Politics. I also care even less about politics and society, and plan to get out of the later as soon as I can.

3. Most of the things we are discussing have no practical value, especially from field of Epistemology (which is my weak spot, admittedly). However, even with my poor understanding of Epistemology your arguments are pointless, because they lead to nowhere, not to say them not being poorly justified.

4. We don't share metaphysical views, to say nothing about values and ethics. I don't see a reason why to even continue discussion with you. You have nothing to offer to me but Logical Positivism, and there is a logical gap between facts and values.

I think you have poorly understood idea of no objective reality, can't say anything about Critical Theory. Idea isn't that there is no objective reality, but that objective reality is not available to individual. Empiricism is limited by senses of the one who, shall we say, observes the object. Those sense may be flawed, for example the subject may be drunk; they may be even biased, like a Christian desperately believing in (their) god, that they see it where it isn't. And even bigger problem is when the same subject who observes the object is himself part of the "experiment"; to say nothing about that I have to empirically test every single thing if I want to see it if it's "true".

No, that's my fault. I was putting the link there and noticed there were some resize parameters via GET-method, so i removed them thinking they were inconsequential (because they almost always are). Usually these parameters cause problems with gog, so i'll post the link un-adultered:

https://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/sei_14401136.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=540%2C301

In case it still poses problem, which it most likely will, here's a video. No audio necessary, but feel free to turn the volume up for fun. I vaguely remember there being pilot audio, but instead there's just music, because, well, this is the closest i can find to an unedited video, because any time you search certain topics like this on youtube, you can generally only find mainstream media results (which, of course, only invokes streisand effect). OOP is indeed overused, because the belief is that one can learn to use and drive a car without actually understanding how a combustion engine, power steering, etc works. The issue is, this often results in unnecessary abstraction, for the sake of abstraction. It's really useful where polymorphism might occur (which seems to be almost exclusively games), which is still just an illusion for automatic pointer management (which results in huge amounts of inefficiency for the cases where you're not actually using polymorphism, because it requires multiple memory accesses which cauase cache misses). In theory, the compiler optimizes this out, but, once again, when the rubber meets the road, the compiler is no where near as good at optimizing as people like to think. I've found ways to make the compiler optimize very well, but it requires doing things which almost no programmer will ever do.

Also, I do alot of C and Assembly.

I assume, though, that you got what i was trying to say.

I'm not sure i agree with the "perpendicular" statement, but the rest i would certainly agree with. The issue with "perpendicular" is that we can get locked into being contrarian. Look at how the current pandemic has been interpreted by the poles: you have blind allegience to the authoritative propaganda on one side, and on the other you have absolutely blind contempt for every suggestion. For example, we all know that this pandemic has been used for political means and gains, and some of the suggestions by authority are absolutely outlandish and ineffective (lockdowns, for example), while in the other corner we have people who absolutely deny the effectiveness of masks (although not perfect, have been empirically demonstrated to work). Worst is, not only has the pro-authority side completely forgotten authority's complete rejection of the pandemic as serious (and consequentially the flip-flop), but those whom are anti-authority have forgotten that they were the first ones to take the pandemic seriously (back when WHO said there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, and that restricting travel was racist). This forgetfulness within 1 year, not just a single generation, but a single year is disturbing to me. We are far, far too invested in the poles that we reject not only empirical reason, but our own damn logic. I fear the mentality of "working perpendicular to each other" would precisely lead to this just as much as "parallel" would lead to corruption. The LGB Alliance is a splinter of the larger LGBTQIA+ movement. The argument is "focus on trans issues and the complete disregard for the more traditional focus of the group" to the degree that they "no longer feel represented." This is exacerbated by certain trans-activists making complaints that, unfortunately, I cannot explain with any degree of clarity on GOG. Let's just say that there are both "sexual interest" as well as "power interest" issues between "biological lesbians" and "trans-women" in particular. Obviously, the former issue is more often cited. Oddly enough, I have not heard the same case for "gay men" and "trans-men" (although, we all know there is no real power component to "being a man," so that throws out one of the two issues). Is not the theory that a new scapegoat will be made to remerge the groups, or did I mis-understand the theory?
You say you can't speak about Critical Theory, but that's what I'm talking about that you cited it. Instead, you speak of a failure of science (or general observation) to limit variables and focus on controls, which is another huge issue i've found as of late in regards to science. Anymore it seems there's so many variables in science whose results are used for political leverage, and not very many controls. Even non-political science. Drug trials are great examples: they're almost exclusively outpatient which means compliance is not very well guaranteed (OD and the inverse are both possible), let alone external factors (other drugs, both illegal and legal, are often not accounted for), causing "side-effects" that aren't actually related, as well as certain side-effects not being taken seriously (because, it turns out, people aren't as stupid as some would like to think, which doesn't mean they can't be wrong).

I don't think that I do. And when we are at it, you use specific scientific results to support your political ideas, so I don't see the point. Scientific results being (ab)used for political agendas (to say nothing of them of being forged) is nothing new. And I am speaking about natural, "hard" sciences, not social sciences.

And matter of control your talking to me seems pointless. I believe that since Kuhn it has been pretty much established in scientific circles that not only social practices affects scientific researches, many scientific breakthroughs were result of specific social conditions. Facts are (mostly?) independent of subjectivity, but interpretations of these facts most certainly don't. And that's just the question of interpretation, if we are speaking about perception, I have come upon ideas that even something as language affects how one perceives the world, which makes me wonder, even if I don't trust the source. So that so called "control" may be detrimental to scientific "progress", but then again if you are conservative, you may not care about.

I think you misunderstand the definition of "control" in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_control

Without controls, unforeseen (either honestly unaware or intentionally ignorant) variables can heavily taint or skew results a certain way. For example, when testing the growth rates of watermelon seeds in different fertilizers, one would expect that a reasonable "control' would be to ensure that we don't source seeds from multiple sources, because the genetic differences between those seeds might be equally or more significant than that of the fertilizer. One can do this multiple times using their funding, if they're aware of it, to repeat the study until they get the "desired results." Even without malicious intent, the faulty results can naturally creep in. Obviously, all attempts should be made to consider recorders, those who setup the experiment, and their natural biases as variables as well. Recorded data should be as close to events as possible, with as little room for observer interpretation as possible, and include all relevant variables (including, say, the fact that multiple sources were used for said seeds). If done so, which should be relatively easy, the outcomes can be properly debated in a public forum.

Critical theory, which you oddly say you don't want to discuss, despite it being precisely what i'm talking about, seems to reject this notion, implying instead that data is naturally flawed, because there is no objective reality. How else can hard sciences be rejected out of hand? This all, naturally, applies to social sciences as well, but to a much greater degree due to the nature of social sciences. Race science, and where it lands, is interesting (no matter, since it's apparently simply "wrong," even when restricted to strictly biology/medicine without regards to anthropology, because biology is suddenly not a hard science when humans are involved, which is a clear demonstration of my concern [i don't really put much stock into "social sciences," really, but I am concerned about how this could, for example, affect the distribution of of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to the people who need it most]).

To be frank, although you don't want to discuss Critical Theory, it's important to do so: it seems to make room for every excuse to criticize that which does not fit a particular narrative. And, well, it's not afraid to admit as much. This can be the rejection of both social and hard science where inconvenient, while support of the flimsiest of social sciences where it is convenient. It is an amorphous cloud that is whatever the power that is wants it to be at any particular moment, and can be re-defined at will for convenience.

But the biggest irony is, well, the inherent (both intentional and unintentional) biases, errors, fraud, manipluation, etc of the hard sciences are subject matters of social science, no? If we were to divorce this conversation from the Frankfurt School, which i see no reason to do so, we're still trying to restrict ourselves to hard sciences while invoking the social sciences (or are we going to pretend this is based entirely in philosophy?).

That everything is based of philosophy there is no question about. Scientific method relies on certain metaphysical (universe is governed by certain physical laws for example) and epistemological assumptions. In return, philosophy should theoretically rely on scientific research to postulate new metaphysical and epistemological ideas. In theory, and ideally at least.

Oh and don't be silly, you don't need to take assumption that there is no objective reality to outright reject hard sciences. Flat Earthers, many of them (fanatical?) Christians, reject results of hard sciences because it doesn't suit their narrative. And for many philosophers, Nietzsche among them, idea of objective reality and objective truth is fundamentally Christian. It's much more powerful tool to reject results of hard sciences outright, not to mention powerful tool of political control. By claiming you posses objective truth, you can use it to outright control and forge results of scientific research to get results you want. And you can be "objective" when you need them to create something effective, such as weapons. Idea of inherent flaw of every data meanwhile means that scientific control you mention isn't enough for "objective truth" you desperately crave, because there are other factors which also affect the outcome, and should be taken in consideration. Yes, it can be used to dismiss results which don't suit your narrative, but so can the other argument, and much more effectively if you ask me. I point to USSR and Catholic Church during Middle Ages for the example.

Or they don't care to converse fairly and without insults. Either way, my advice is to ignore them on this topic/thread.

You won't define words or accept other peoples definitions for the words they use. Fine.

So let's evolve "capitalism" so people are limited in how much of other peoples personal property and essential natural resources they can "own". This way people can have more freedom! Sound good? Or have fallen for too much propaganda for you to even consider the matter?

You know that it doesn't alert us of new posts if you just @ our name? Well I didn't know that either, well it doesn't. You must reply to someone for them to be alerted. I am not sure if it alerts them if you edit in your reply after posting. Please tell me if it does.

Responding to your post. A reminder, one does not need government control to have what many term as "socialism", in fact its really another issue altogether. You need government control to keep the worst of capitalism from going off the rails and being a disaster.

People need to look up ANARCHISM that is a social economic, and governmental concept where both government and big money elites and businesses can't rule us and in fact have a minimal involvement in our lives. It is not anarchy though, despite the similarity of the words. Anarchism is a form of socialism, despite there being much less government involved in the typical theory of it than many capitalist nations of today.

But setting aside the ideals, we do need more government involvement to stop big money from stealing from and abusing everyone else. And we do need taxes on big money to redirect some of it back to regular people that had their money stolen from them by big money in the first place. We need to put a stop to corporate welfare where big business is constantly getting undeserved hand outs of tax payer money. This isn't exactly "socialism" this is putting a check on capitalism for the people, a simple pragmatic approach to what we have currently. In order for this to happen, we need more people to recognize how capitalism has failed them, how much the bio money elites rule us, not to replace capitalism, but to put a check on the power it gives to big money elites.

If government doesn't control some of big money elites, the elites control government. They do that now even. They rule us from the shadows. I want to be free.

Rojimboo, you're right about many of the other stuff you said, but that gets us into political and divisive stuff I'd prefer to sidestep as best as I can. What matters is fixing these wrongs, not finger pointing. I am not saying it is wrong for you to point all this out, this is just how I see best to handle this kind of thing for myself.

That said, certain things said should not be left unchallenged.

It sounds like you've completely fallen for propaganda on the right, like utterly. You are not someone to debate what is good or evil when you don't even know what's true. Most all of what you said is utter BS. Antifa is anti-faciest, people who generally protest and counter protest to push back on facism. They do not typically commit violence against people, far more likely for violence to be done to them. Police in general can be incredibly violent.

BLM tends to protest when violence is done to black people, especially since there is evidence in the numbers that police on average act with extreme racism in how they deal with people, often with deadly consequences

There was zero fucking evidence of significant voter fraud in the 2020 US election,(more than any other election including the one that elected Drumpf. That is to say, almost zero) Biden won by a comfortable margin, well above any theoretical voter fraud of 0.00001% or whatever. Regardless some people bent over backwards to prove there was no fucking fraud.

What this is, is Drumpf not wanting to admit defeat, and gas-lighting the entire nation as best as he can. Most people don't fall for his gas-lighting (gas-lighting is denying reality, and repeating a fake reality till someone believes it. From a old movie by the same name where a man does exactly that to his wife) but somehow Drumpf supporters fail to see him as the mega fraud and con-artist he clearly is and of course bought it. Thus a group of assholes at invitation of Drumpf come storming down in stupid anger, and then Drumpf gives the order that they be let in, a video clearly shows the police holding the crowd at the gates and then falling back for no reason to let the assholes in. The only one with the means and the will to do something that horrendously stupid is Drumpf. As a result 5 people died, lots of property damage and theft and the whole capital is terrorized by some ignorant assholes for the day, all because of Drumpf, and you stlll can't see it?!?

We also had police taking selfies etc with the violent mob, in clear contrast to the violence they have committed on much more peaceful groups. Clearly these assholes were giving much preferential treatment.

Also keep in mind Drumpf lost the popular vote in 2016, that is to say more people voted for Hilary than voted for Drumpf! Despite that, the large scale protests against Drumpf never resulted in assholes sacking the capital.